Podcasts

Year 4 examples

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 12:00:10 +1100

This year in the junior school Laptops have provided the students with opportunities to not only research new information but as a means to share and present their newly discovered knowledge in creative and individual ways. The students have experienced many new pieces of software to use as tools to best showcase their understanding of what they have learnt.
As a culminating activity for their unit of work on meteorology the students in Year 4 were required to complete a project which demonstrated their understanding of the topic. They were given a variety of choices and could present their findings using the medium for which they felt appropriate for them, either with or without the aide of ICT. One of the ICT activities was to create a Podcast reporting on the event of a natural disaster and the second being to create a Kahootz animation of a boys journey through the water cycle. Both these activities required the students to use the knowledge they had gained from the studied unit and transpose it into a new and creative form, rather then simply relaying researched information.
Podcasts allow the students to present their acquired knowledge in a form where they can add graphics and sound to enhance the information they are portraying. It also allows students still developing their public speaking skills to present to the class in a way where they feel more comfortable and less inhibited. Experience shows that, having had this experience, more students are prepared to speak publicly
Projects using software such as Kahootz require the skill of manipulating information into an animated form. This encourages the student to organise and evaluate their knowledge in a creative way which will best portray to an audience what they have learnt. This is a form of higher order thinking which will come easier to a child when they are creating in a form that interests them greatly and is exciting to use.
Examples of both are on the Knowledge website (knowledge.as.edu.au) in the "Podcasts" section. Have a look and be amazed at the student's' creativity and the sophistication of their learning. This is a real credit to their teacher Chris Wright, Alex Portell (Year 3 teacher 2008) and the leadership of Hilary Harvey, who has been assisting Juniior school teachers in their ICT journeys.

And yet more Japanese from Year 2

Thu, 7 Jun 2007 15:37:31 +1000

This semester Year 2 have been learning to copy sentences written in Japanese script based on the things they like to eat and play. "What do you like? "

More Japanese from year 1

Thu, 7 Jun 2007 15:36:01 +1000

This semester Year 1 have been learning to copy sentences written in Japanese script and have practised using and writing Japanese numbers. They have also as a class presented oral work; saying their name and age. "How old are you?"

Littlies show their learning

Thu, 17 May 2007 13:23:22 +1000

Kindergarten have been tracing over Japanese Hiragana symbols and learning to pronounce Japanese phrases.
Listen to this podcast to hear them introducing themselves and to see some of their self-portraits.
You may notice that all the boys use a different word to begin their introduction than the girls. This is because young boys may use "boku" to indicate the word "I ", whereas "watashi" may be used by both girls and boys to indicate the word "I".
“Watashi wa Catherine desu” means “My name is Catherine” (or, literally, I am Catherine)
Teacher Catherine Boydell put together this podcast where the students recorded their pronunciations when introducing themselves in Japanese.
Origato Mrs Boydell!

Yarrahapinni

Sun, 6 May 2007 16:15:45 +1000

Year 9 spend week 2 of term 2 at Yarrahapinni ecology centre each year.

What do they do there?

Teachers Gordon McLennan, Wally Richards, Andrew Horsfield and several year 9 boys explain the Science.

Over the last few years, the 17 year old excursion has moved increasingly to an IT centred reporting mechanism, with groups of four boys using laptops to gather and analyse data, then, using a very easy to learn web production tool called iWeb, publishing their work on a server brought to the area specifically for this purpose.

Thanks to Maths teacher Amanda Robins for her invaluable help in putting this together.