Week 3

In this week's workshop the focus was on design and creativity.

Firstly, we learnt about the value of a design brief and were

provided with an example that you can see here. It is broken
down into sections which are Investigate/Design, Produce and Analyse/Evaluate. I learnt that this is a good tool for students to use at the beginning of a design project to help them gather their ideas, but that it is also a good idea for a final good copy to also be submitted to clearly see the steps that the students work through.

We had the opportunity to plan and implement a design brief as we were given a problem to solve. We had to make a picture of a frog jump, and were only allowed to use a rubber band, sticky tape and cardboard.

My group decided to fold the cardboard into 4 to create a concertina effect. We stuck the picture of the frog onto the face of the cardboard using the sticky tape and looped the rubber band through the cardboard.

When we pressed down on the frog the result was like a spring action and froggy jumped! It was great to see first hand how completing the design brief goes hand in hand with creating the final product and I think is a great way to provide some structure and scaffolding to students when they complete a similar task. To extend this task we could have looked at using different sized cardboard, or testing how far or high froggy jumped in comparison to other teams results. One thing that I really took away from this activity is that 'technology' in terms of the curriculum doesn't necessarily have to be computer based. A hands-on materials based activity such as this is also incredibly valuable for students.

The next activity was to look at some online technologies, and in particular online games. We were introduced to www.quia.com/web and were able to explore the games we could create through this site.

First I created a quiz, which was a simple multiple choice about farm animals. As a group we were then able to have a go at trying each others quizzes which was a lot of fun. I think this would be a fantastic activity for students to show their understandings of a topic they have just studied. At the primary school where I did my first placement they have implemented an accelerated reading program where each time they finish a book they have to complete a comprehension quiz on the computer. I think that a really great exercise to couple with this would be for students to create their own quiz about a book they have read. Another classmate or the teacher could then read that book and answer the student's quiz.

In addition to the quiz we learnt about the different activities that can also be created on this site such as hangman, word jumbles, word searches, concentration cards and many many more. I really enjoyed using this site and will try to use it on my next practicum to see how the students respond to it.

Here are some of the other games I

created in this workshop