At the beginning of our second week, we went straight on to creating our own movie animations using plasticine. Mandy and I worked as a pair and I feel we worked very well together. We decided to stick by our theme of a healthy lifestyle and began creating plasticine models of fruit. The plan was to have the character in our animation cutting up fruit for herself to eat when she returned from the gym. However, we came across a few problems as we progressed... We spent just over an hour creating our plasticine models and when we set them out we realised that our plasticine was almost the same size as our character and it was not in proportion. We very quickly made our fruit slightly smaller and set up our animation scene (with a kitchen scene in the background and white paper for the floor), ready start using the Digital Blue cameras. We also had to close all the blinds as we had a lot of light reflection from outside. We started taking snapshots and moving our plasticine models as appropriate. Mandy and I both found this very frustrating: it is very time consuming and takes great patience.
During the process, we came across another problem. The white paper we used for the flooring in our animation moved slightly when we moved one of our models. If we were to do this again, we would either have to secure the paper with blue tack or just use the desk as the floor and made sure we were not using a computer right next to the window.
We eventually, finished our 'filming' and Collette helped us to export and save the AVI file. We did not however have time to add in any extras such as sound as we ran out of time. I have a copy of the animation saved on the University computer system and Mandy has a copy on a USB drive to be uploaded.
Overall, I enjoyed creating our short animation despite it being frustrating and the Digital Blue Movie Creator cameras were fairly simple to use.
Here is our movie animation:
On Thursday, our session with Sharon, we discussed our Voices of the World project and were allocated countries for our bear journey. My group is linked with a German TEI: Birgit Reutlingen. We then created a task for our Voices of the World project before saying goodbye to our bears!
We discussed some of the different useful websites that could be used to create a task for the different countries. These included Mixbook, One True Media, Voice Thread, My Plick and Slideshare. These may be useful in the future in different lessons.
My group was asked to create a task linked to the month of February and so decided to go with a Valentine's theme. We used the following poem and created four vokis, each one saying one line of the poem:
"Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Sugar is sweet,
And so are you."
As an extra, we created another voki saying "I love you" and created a power-point showing some traditional which we then uploaded to the Slideshare website.
I had some difficulty getting the vokis we created to display on my blog - to see the task Mandy and I created for the month of February, please click here.
Sunday 30 January 2011
Sunday 23 January 2011
Week One
We have now come to the end of the first week of our ICT elective. In the first session, we were told exactly what we would be doing over the weeks. This includes keeping a reflective blog, taking part in a 'Voices of the World' project, a bear journey, creating movie animations, as well as working with some of our peers taking the Modern Languages Elective to create our own movies and having IWB training. We were also introduced to the idea of keeping a reflective blog where we are able to reflect on our experiences and the work we have done in class.
I am looking forward to what is to come over this semester. From the ICT Elective, I am hoping to gain a better insight into the different ideas and tools I can implement into my lessons in the primary classroom. At the moment I feel fairly confident about using ICT in my lessons, however, at the end of this Elective, I hope that I am much more comfortable and can take away some of the ideas and use these with my own class.
In the second session, to begin with we discussed communities of practice. In order to help us understand this term, we took part in an activity where certainvwords were read out and we had to write down the first word that came to our minds. We then folded over our paper and passed it on for the next person to write something and so on. The point of this exercise was that we ended up with a piece of paper with words written on that simplifies the meaning of communities of practice. I ended up with words such as together, collaborate and group. The following quote was taken from Learning Communities in Practice by Anastasia P. Samaras, Anne R. Freese, Clare Kosnik (page 151): "Wenger et al. (2002) define communities of practice as "groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis" (p. 4). Close proximity is not a requirement but passion is."
We were then organised into groups in which we worked on our bear projects. We will be putting together a package including a teddy bear and some other items, perhaps a letter to send abroad. In return we will receive a bear which we will all be able to take home in turn. My group has not managed to come to a decision as of yet in terms of what we are sending, however, I am looking forward to meeting with everyone to bring our ideas together and get organised for sending our bear off on Thursday!
In the first session of our second week, we are creating movie animations similar to those we made in BEd 1. I have read over the instructions for the workshop and am looking forward to see what we are able to create. Here is the movie animation my group created last year:
I am looking forward to what is to come over this semester. From the ICT Elective, I am hoping to gain a better insight into the different ideas and tools I can implement into my lessons in the primary classroom. At the moment I feel fairly confident about using ICT in my lessons, however, at the end of this Elective, I hope that I am much more comfortable and can take away some of the ideas and use these with my own class.
In the second session, to begin with we discussed communities of practice. In order to help us understand this term, we took part in an activity where certainvwords were read out and we had to write down the first word that came to our minds. We then folded over our paper and passed it on for the next person to write something and so on. The point of this exercise was that we ended up with a piece of paper with words written on that simplifies the meaning of communities of practice. I ended up with words such as together, collaborate and group. The following quote was taken from Learning Communities in Practice by Anastasia P. Samaras, Anne R. Freese, Clare Kosnik (page 151): "Wenger et al. (2002) define communities of practice as "groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis" (p. 4). Close proximity is not a requirement but passion is."
We were then organised into groups in which we worked on our bear projects. We will be putting together a package including a teddy bear and some other items, perhaps a letter to send abroad. In return we will receive a bear which we will all be able to take home in turn. My group has not managed to come to a decision as of yet in terms of what we are sending, however, I am looking forward to meeting with everyone to bring our ideas together and get organised for sending our bear off on Thursday!
In the first session of our second week, we are creating movie animations similar to those we made in BEd 1. I have read over the instructions for the workshop and am looking forward to see what we are able to create. Here is the movie animation my group created last year:
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