We are now in the second half of the school year and I thought it time to reflect back on what we have accomplished so far. I have selected different sections from our thrice annual LRC Report, that I thought worth sharing with everyone.
Cross Curricular Initiatives
The LRC and ICT departments work closely with other departments on many cross curricular activities over the course of a school year. So far this year we have completed the following:
CAL1
- English: 6th Grade Quest project-working with sound effects and podcasting using Audacity and Garageband
- English: 7th Grade students worked on Digital Video Production with iMovie during the Little Brother
- History: 7th Grade students evaluated Historical Resources in ICT Lessons in support of their History work.
- LRC Induction: The 6th grade worked on a library scavenger hunt, using iPads and QR Codes.
CAL 2
- English: The 8th Grade students took their Juliet a Room as a Character's Mind and Outsiders Projects to another level, when they created their rooms as 3D models using SketchUp.
- Science: The 8th Grade Students learned more about classification when they ventured into our new ABC El Salvador Virtual World located on, Jokaydia Grid.
- Minecraft: The 7th grade students are currently in the midst of using their History knowledge of castles and fortresses to create their own group constructions which they will test out in survival mode three weeks after the Easter holidays.
- English Podcasts: The 8th grade students worked with iPad Apps, Garageband and Audacity to create journalism podcasts for their English lessons.
- English Digital Poetry: The 7th grade students worked with MovieMaker on the laptops and iMovie and Story Kit on the iPads, to combine voice and images in digital video or storybook format, to create their poetry projects.
Cal 2 Cross Curricular Initiatives coming up
What is New in ICT?
Digital Books:
Students in 6th through 8th grade will be creating digital interactive
books this school year. 6th grade will be using
Book Creator on the
iPads and 7th through 8th
iBooks Author on the new Macs to compile their
books. Research work will precede the development of these e-books.
Minecraft has now become a part of the 7th grade
curriculum this year. We have purchased a class set of
Minecraft Edu
accounts and have set up an ABCICT server. Students are now working on
their structures in teams, having reviewed castles and fortresses and
worked on floor plans in Google draw. The 7th grade experts and team
leaders have been putting in extra hours from 2-3:00 most days (purely
out of choice) working on the main structures. These experts are a part
of the planning process, will lay down the rules for testing day and
mentor other students as they work on their tasks.They will also take on
the more difficult challenges creating traps and other devices. The
lessons focus on building castles and fortresses in creative mode and
testing will take place in survival mode, possibly with PVP.
Minecraft Edu, allows the teacher oversee student work, turn off
building and chat, switch modes as well as allow teleports and freeze
students. These tools have proven very useful so far. The one problem we
have encountered in the project is that of respect for the property of
others. Certain students have accessed the server during build time
after school (incognito) and trolled the work of others. They have all
been warned that the after school blocks will be taken away if this
continues.
Jokaydia Grid: The
ABC Avatar Club was a great success
with a small group of students from 6th to 8th grade joining in. The
younger students picked up the skills very quickly and soon the half
region was well populated with strange alien plant forms. Science
classes in 8th grade have begun to use the region with each class going
inworld for two lessons to classify alien plant life using Earthly
classification methods. Mr. Horrocks and Mrs. Garcia are preparing a
blog post on the activity.
Diigo: 6th grade used
Diigo in January, as part of
their
research project and their research based presentations will be
done and ready to present the weeks before and after the holidays.
Evernote: iPad, desktop and browser versions
are being used as part of the
8th grade research project, for web
clipping and note taking. We are hopeful that students will adopt it for
work in other subjects once they become comfortable with it.
Easybib: 6th, 7th and 8th grades have all worked with
EasyBib this year using their ABC-Net accounts and Humanities is now
adopting it with their 9th grade students.
iPads: The iPads continue to be used heavily for a
variety of activities such as lesson starters, animation work, sound
recording, research and Voicethread presentations, QR Code scavenger
hunts, and short video recordings, web searches clipping with Evernote.
Much of the 6th grade curriculum is moving toward work with iPads, the
are used in both 7th and 8th grades, for certain units and creative
carrousel work as well.
7th Grade Carousel: an ongoing animation project in
which the students are asked to create a
one minute animation about the
ABC Traits and Values. As previously mentioned, the iPads have allowed
us to experiment more freely with different types of animation which
were too difficult and cumbersome to work with in the past.
Extra Curricular
ABC Jokaydia
The club constructed ABC Pandora during a period of 7 weeks. The club
was made up of 6-8th grade students. The 6-7th grade students learned to
build in a 3D environment in-world under the guidance of 8th grade, Mr.
Horrocks and Mrs. Garcia.
Robotics
Robotics Club, which is supervised by Mr. Gray, has been organised and
run by several 11th grade students who are teaching students to build
and program robots using our
Lego Mindstorm Robot Kits.
Animation
The Animation Club is an ongoing extra
curricular club which meets on Wednesdays. The club is open to animation
enthusiasts who seek to learn more about animation; whether it be the
history of animation, styles of animation and workshops on creating your
own animated short feature. Some of the animation styles which explored
in the club are: clay animation, paper animation, classical (drawn)
digital animation, pixilation and recently looking into incorporating a
course of 3d animation with a free downloadable software program called
Blender. We've also purchased a light table and classical animation
equipment, alongside reading materials which are relevant for teaching
and learning animation skills.
Communication
The following channels are those most frequently used to communicate with the ABC Community and share happenings at the LRC:
Facebook,
ABC LRC Blog
LRC Website,
LRC Twitter,
LRCABC Youtube,
LRC ABC Flickr.
These sites are updated by the LRC Staff members on a regular basis.
The LRC newsletter has been discontinued in favour of the LRC Blog and
Facebook Page.
Reports
Student visits on LRC passes: 1,203. (December 2012-March 2013).
The Top Read Books at the ABC from January to March of 2013
This is our 4th year running the A Better World Project, and it is ageing very well. We have come a long way from that first year. When we first started out we were using Blabberize to produce rapping images, then we introduced student performances. Eventually with the arrival of our first set of iPads, we began creating characters with even more movement using Morfo.
We had intended to run the project exclusively on iPads this year, working with Google Drive for collaborative lyric writing, Garageband for music production, Morfo for digital rappers and iMovie for the final video production, however that too has changed.
So we are back on the Macs, using Google Drive, Garageband, iMovie, Crazy Talk and Wikispaces. The kids are loving it and so are we.
