Super dooper music looper!!

Creating our tunes on this programme was great and so easy to do. It was heaps of fun to mix the various sounds together and place them in different areas to create our mix! This is a fab programme for children to use at school as it easy and accessible. It allows the children to create and express their ideas in a fun and imaginative way, it also enhances team work and collaboration of ideas!

Here are our two mixes!!.....

http://www.esnips.com/doc/97e6bab6-d2da-468b-9194-3e63f6552eec/groovy..-mental

http://www.esnips.com/doc/007aab0c-53f4-4637-b00b-90780f71df2e/the-crew-tune

You may need to let them buffer as they stutter a lil bit at first!

Puppet workout animation!!

Creating our puppet animation movie was wicked! So much fun! It was really interesting finding out how animations are actually created. I never knew there was so much work behind them. I did find the actual taking of pictures a little tedious, however when it all came to together at the end it was worth it! I think this type of activity in schools is really benificial as it really gets you into the technology and excited about the outcome. As Iv'e said before Im really not that technicaly minded however doing an activity like this really makes you feel like you've accomplished something, so for children who have a lack of confidence in this area it would be a real boost for them to create an animation such as this.



Enjoy our puppet workout!!

Story starts!

Another fab way ICT can be used is at the beginnings of lessons to inspire and draw the children in to the main learning content. I witnessed ICT being used in this context in a year 6 class during a Literacy lesson. The teacher opened the lesson by introducing a video clip which captured the children's imaginations; she then got them to write their own account of the next scene to the story. The outcome was a success as the children were fully engaged in the video clip and were excited about continuing the story for themselves. With prompting from the teacher, this can be an excellent source for enhancing creative writing.

Here is the link.....

http://www.teachers.tv/video/13826

Some thoughts to start with......

When I first heard that we had to create a blog on ICT related info I did freak a little as, for me I prefer the old pen and paper approach as it seems so much more simple and less stressful. However I have to admitt that in previous school practices when I have endeavoured to apply ICT to my lessons I have found them to be extremely successful. Not only have the kids been motivated and inspired to dive into their tasks but I as the teacher have felt inspired more so than usual, whilst delivering the lessons. The overall outcome of the lessons therefore, were positive all round.

During my previous school experience I had a year 1/2 class, there were several websites that I used again and again in plenarys, introductions, mental orals and just about everything and anything. The first one which I would recommend to anyone is a website called Topic box. A friend and me stumbled over this while searching for lesson inspiration! It has just about everything and anything for every subjct and saves hours of searching and scanning the web for topics. It's fab! Here is the link below...

http://www.topicbox.co.uk/

Another site found useful was the woodlands juniour school site. This again has heaps of great ideas for IWB use and is especially fab for intro's to the lessons. I mainly used it for maths mental orals as the kids loved it! I found that no matter how dull a maths topic could possibly be, using interactive ICT means made the lessons 100% more enjoyable! Whether it was team games with times tables, beating indivdual targets or a class effort to beat the clock in scoring points, all the children enthusiastically participated. So the link for the maths site here is....

http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/maths/