Talbot Space Project

A y10/11 class from Talbot School used the CLC this term to create a film for their Space project. They began by creating science fiction sounds and music in Garageband on the Apple Macbooks. Garageband is a great tool for composing music and creating soundtracks as it comes with a large number of sound effects and music loops that can be combined in layers. Some of the pupils managed to work independently, to choose sounds they liked and drag them across to different tracks. Others needed a bit more support, but all were involved in making decisions about the sounds they wanted.

In a later session the class acted out scenes in space in front of the Green Screen, for example lifting off in the rocket, walking on the moon and planting flags. This footage will be accompanied by the sound tracks they created.

French Colours and Numbers Photostories

A year 4 class from Woodseats Primary School spent the afternoon at the CLC yesterday. The aim was to practise the numbers and colours in French whilst learning some new ICT skills.  Originally we thought of creating animations, but with such a short space of time I decided that using Microsoft’s Photostory would be more successful.

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I sourced a number of photographs using Flickr, searching using the Creative Commons licence. These were either colouful objects and animals (mainly cognates, e.g. tigre), or a number of items in your school bag (e.g. 2 rulers). We practised the numbers and colours as a whole class, and showed them how to use Photostory. They then chose to do the numbers or colours Photostory, and added French text to each photo. They could choose to add the word for the colour or number, or write a simple sentence with support from a vocabulary list, e.g. la banane est jaune.

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Whilst they were working I took groups out to record the colours and numbers using an mp3 recorder, and the audio was then added to the Photostories.

The class teacher said, “Thank you very much for this afternoon’s work.  My class loved it!  They got so much out of the afternoon’s experience.  I have told the children we are going to use our animations as part of our next class assembly.“

(Photos from Flickr.com by:

.stocker, Yea I Knit, Louisa Catlover, looseends, someToast, Timothy K Hamilton, fernando, roarpett, digitalART2, ~ Panache, Damon Green, Jason Gulledge, santoshnc)

Primary ICT Activity Generator

Over the holidays I came across the Learning Event Generator by John Davitt, which generates over 2500 permutations of topic and activity, for example: “Do the concept of gravity as a blow by blow sports commentary” or one of my favourites: “Do the history of the Olympics as a mime”.

I then decided to create my own slightly more colourful version aimed at Primary teachers, to randomise choice of ICT activities. You can see the Activity Generator here. Type in your own topic at the top, press the button and it randomly generates an ICT activity.

To make it even more useful to teachers, it is in the form of a template, whereby you can edit a text file with your own options, to create a bespoke list of activities. If this template would be useful to you, please e-mail me at cmoore@ssclc.net, and I’ll send it along.

Finally, if you teach at one of our partnership schools (see list here), you are welcome to come along to the CLC with your pupils to be used as guinea pigs for a randomly generated ICT activity session – with small groups working on the same topic, but all using a different medium.

How To Guides from NGfL Cymru

See the Welsh National Grid for Learning website for some excellent, free How To guides on a variety of topics. They cover using applications like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint to create learning resources, plus guides to using the free software Audacity to record a school radio show.

Radio programmes – Life on a plantation

Here are some radio programmes about life on a plantation. They were created by year 9 students at Newfield using mp3 players to record the audio, and the free software Audacity to edit them. They take a little time to load up, and you’ll need Quicktime to view them (you can download it for free here):

Radio Show 1

Radio Show 2

Further examples will be posted at this site – http://newfieldgeogblog.wordpress.com/

Resources for Science

Here are some interesting websites with resources for science lessons. Please feel free to comment on this post and add your own favourites.

• http://www.scibermonkey.org/ – organises a large number of excellent websites in topics for key stage 3 science.
• http://www.ted.com/ – a collection of video talks by the world’s greatest thinkers and doers, with a section on science. Students can listen to talks from, amongst others, Richard Dawkins, Al Gore or James Watson.
• http://www.newscientist.com/podcast.ns – listen to a number of podcasts from the New Scientist.