Week 4

http://www.thelearningfederation.edu.au/default.asp

First we looked at the educational federation website in this weeks workshop. This website is very useful as a strong teaching resource including for subjects like civics and citizenship, environment, languages, mathematics, science etc. Hence this this website is linked with the Australian curriculum in a way.

This is the link to the dust echoes website.
http://www.abc.net.au/dustechoes/

Dust Echoes- Namorrador

I found this website really colorful and entertaining. The website consists of twelve animated stories which tells about aboriginal love, loyalty, duties and custom. I found out from the website that we can learn the meaning of different aboriginal words and also learn to pronounce it. The story of Namorrador was really a thrilling story but I am not quite sure if students under grade 4 should be exposed to it as the animation is really scary and disturbing in some parts. But some of the stories was really interesting and calm. This website would provide lot of activities for students. Students can look at the video and have a discussion about the story line. Students can also view and decode the story and put it in different ways. Students can improve their research  and planning skills by researching on different characters and planning to put it in to story. This will in turn improve their writing skills. The images was created from inspiration. We had to print screen the each scene and put it in to inspiration and later save it. And finally put in to the blog. I found it bit hard as it was repetitive process but got used to it after few try and I was quite happy with the whole image.

Microsoft Excel- M&Ms

Before this exercise I never imagined that microsoft  excel could be used in a primary class. But because the activity was done in a fun way i think students will like to work with excel eventhough it looks boring. It will be a good activity to intorduce students to graps, different types of charts etc. Studetns can also get an idea about fractiions using excel as well. It will be good to bring parents who work in the financial area and could do a presentation on excel to the students. The idea of working M&Ms with excel was a great idea and with a pie chart we can determine the data and find out  ratio, fractiona and also percentage.. We had to count the of different colour M&Ms and create a graph and a pie chart. I think with this exercise students can compare the result in pictorial form and it is very easy to organise. The different colours and the characters of M&Ms will interest the students more in to the topic.