Group items tagged

"It's time to set up week two's coding challenge. You are going to need a little help getting started on this one! We need to set up some colour selection tools in our drawing app. But adding colour selection can be challenging and there are many ways to accomplish this task. In this video, I go through one way of getting this task started in Hopscotch. The video will broach two new ideas: VARIABLES - or in Hopscotch parlance VALUES and colour number codes...."

"'It's boring', he groaned, glancing sideways beseechingly. 'Do I have to do it. Why do I need to learn to code?'  Part of the year 6 gifted and talented class, this student punched keys, slammed the laptop shut, yanked it open again. His friend offered to help. Desolately he turned back to the coding lessons. I continue cruising the classroom stepping over lanky legs harbouring slumped socks, dodging flailing arms. 'It's really easy - it's like the games we play. I'm trying to trip it up,' one boy tells me as I watch the psychedelic coloured spinning shape. It reminds me of a rapidly created multi-coloured elastic band ball. He's chuckling with glee. I am amazed. This was my first coding class as a supply teacher."

"How would you feel if someone described you as being colorless? Yeah, it's not exactly a compliment. Being called colorless is basically an unsubtle way of being told you are dull, uninteresting or boring. And just as some people are 'colorless', so is a lot of the content we deliver to our kids. But luckily it is a lot easier to inject a bit of color into a curriculum than it is into a personality. In a recently published slideshare titled 'Colour in Mathematics' Math teacher and blogger, Colleen Young, shows how she uses color to add clarity and engagement to her lessons:"

"One of the essential features of Google Image, but overlooked by most students, is to search for images using images instead of text. This is especially important when searching for information around a certain image. For instance, in a field trip with class to the local zoo, students came a cross a little bug that they did not know. To learn more about this bug they can use their smart phones to take a picture of it and upload it to Google Image. If the first page of search results did not turn out accurate results they can add some text to the image ( like for example its colour, how many legs it has...etc)."

"Google Image is one of the powerful image search engines online and it is probably one of the first options students head to when searching for images to use in their multimedia projects.Of course, there other several other great platforms for searching for images to use for educational purposes but today I want to focus on Google Image and share with you some overlooked tips that students need to pay heed to when searching for images. Using these tips, students will be able to : Search images by usage rights Search images by type Search image with specific set of colours Search image by size "

" This week I've been collaborating with Year 4 students, and their inspiring classroom teacher and fellow ADE Dan Aivaliotis-Martinez (@martinezgeek). We developed some ideas for teaching and learning that connected Sphero devices with art-making practices - in a nutshell, programming a Sphero ball to move with the coloured light turned on, recording the trail, or 'light painting', photographically. These cross-curricular lessons drew upon elements of the curriculum in science, maths, technology and the arts, as students created 'light paintings'."

www.quirkology.com Created by Richard Wiseman

Great resources of images such as : Inspirational images The Big Picture from the Boston Times. . For Science; Mercury Images, Robots, Hubble Images, International Space Station, Earth and Environment, Animals, Zoos, Swine Flu. For Citizenship powerful images of the protests in Iran, and here. Also Life in Iraq, For Geography - images of Cyclones, Earth Observed, Hurricanes from Above, Hurricane Ike For RE - Carnival, Easter, Holy Week, Hindu festival of colours, The Haaj, Christmas, For Art - La Princesse, Festival of Lights, The BBC website also has an "In Pictures" section

"A tessellation is created when a shape is repeated over and over again. The collection of figures on the plane have no gaps and no overlaps. Patterns created this way have an incredible mathematical rhythm. Not only are tessellations fun to create, they can teach students about the function, and relationship between, the elements of art (line, shape, colour, etc). They can also be used to make strong links to other subjects, particularly maths (incremental increases, angles, space, golden ratio, etc)."

"Creating tutorials and explanatory guides is best done through the help of screenshots. These are pictures we take of our screens to share with others or include in a visual demonstration of how, for example, a process works. As teachers and educators we often find ourselves in need of such visual annotations and cues to enhance our students comprehensibility. There are several web tools that we can use to create screenshots and we have already reviewed some of them in past publications here. Today, we are introducing you to what we consider to be the best 4 web tools for creating screenshots. Besides being free, these tools are very simple to use and are also student friendly. They will allow you to  capture your screen, crop and annotate your pictures using  arrows, colours, shapes, text and many more. "

"he video does not seem remarkable on first viewing. A title informs us that we are watching Ashley Hinton, a teacher at Vailsburg Elementary, a school in Newark, New Jersey. Hinton, a blonde woman in a colourful silk scarf, stands before a class of eight- and nine-year-old boys and girls, almost all of whom are African-American. "What might a character be feeling in a story?" she asks. She repeats the question, before engaging her pupils in a high-tempo conversation about what it is like to read a book and why authors write them, as she moves smartly around her classroom. On an October morning last year, I watched Doug Lemov play this video to a room full of teachers in the hall of an inner-London school. Many had brought their copy of Lemov's book, Teach Like a Champion, which in the last five years has passed through the hands of thousands of teachers and infiltrated hundreds of staffrooms. To my eyes, the video of Hinton's lesson was a glimpse into the classroom of an energetic and likable teacher, and pleasing enough. After leading a brief discussion, Lemov played it again, and then a third time."

"Stickyboard2 is a very good iPad app for creating sticky notes and mind maps. Actually, Stickyboard2 turns your iPad into a giant whiteboard with a never-ending stack of sticky notes. The regular price of the app is $9.99 but it is on sale today for free, at least here in Canada and also in the States. Not sure if it's free in other places. Taking notes and creating sticky notes on Stickyboard2 is super easy.The app supports a number of coloured markers you can use to write your notes. Arranging and organizing notes is also another powerful feature provided by this app. You can easily select a bunch of notes, then swipe with 3 fingers to instantly arrange them into neat piles or fan them out into a grid, columns, or rows. And the best thing of all is that you can export and share your stickies in text or PDF format."

""ICE CREAM!" A group of six year olds are grinning as a small girl holds a laminated picture in her hands. Calmly, she puts it down and picks up the robot bee sitting in front of her. It has five buttons on top: forwards, left, right, back and go. The girl prods a few of them in turn, puts the bee down and presses go. It trundles across a colourful mat, turns left and stops on a picture of an ice cream cone. Everyone cheers. This short exercise has just taught her basic vocabulary, logic, sequencing and navigation. The robotic bee is one of four high-tech toys being trialled with pre-school children across Singapore. It is part of a new scheme - called Playmaker - using technology to give the next generation skills the they require. GI caught up with with the educators, technologists and government officials behind the scheme to find out more."

Colourful language in this post, however lots of really strong points made. An alternative to the "technology is bad" rhetoric so prevalent in social media posts/cartoons/popular opinion.

" It was visual literacy in action this week at The Kellett School in Hong Kong as a variety of elementary classes explored logo design for packaging. These young learners needed to craft a distinctive design, using a considered colour palette and a combination of shapes, in Assembly app on their iPads. While there are a whole variety of tools that can be used for this kind of task, one of the powerful tools in this app is actually one that is missing - text! With no words 'to do the talking', the principles of art and design took centre stage during the production of this purely visual piece of communication. "

"In our three gr. 8 classrooms, students have learned the process of 3D printing using dual extrusion (printing with 2 colours) using a Makerbot Replicator 2X. Last year, due to the large number of students we had using the printer, we needed another to keep up, but this time we chose an AirWolf 3D HDR printer for a few reasons: cloud based slicing via Astroprint, larger print size, and the ability to print with a wider range of materials. Added bonus - the tech support help from AirWolf3D is excellent. While I've posted some examples of how our students design and print using dual extrusion with the Makerbot, my teaching partner, Marc Westra, and I quickly learned the process was quite different using an AW3D HDR - like taking the elevator instead of the stairs. Here's what I learned over the Christmas break, and what we'll be teaching our students…"

"Chronas is an interesting new web tool we discovered through Larry Ferlazzo. This is a history application that link Wikipedia and Wikidata with a chronological and cartographical view. Chronas allows you to explore the world history through the use of a colourful map together with a time slider beneath it. You can use the time slider to select a given period in time and view the events that marked its history. You can also click on the different regions and locations on the map to access and read Wikipedia articles related to them."