Hi Everyone, the 3rd annual ABC Digital Video Awards is right around the corner! This year's awards promise to be greater than ever. We will be sending out voting instructions in two week's time.
Have a look at our video add below and do consider submitting a video by May 10th.
Official ABC DVA 2013 Advertisement
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
6th Grade Discovers Audio Books
Last school year I began purchasing playaway audio books for the LRC. We had a nice cabinet put together for them, introduced students to them in assemblies and orientation lessons and then waited for the demand to become greater than the supply. It didn't happen quite that way, Some of the audio books became very popular and a certain number of students did use them often, but it wasn't the explosion we had expected.
Schools are busy places and initiatives, while important, can often get waylaid temporarily at certain crunch times. It doesn't mean they are forgotten and it is not necessarily a bad thing. Often we need to step back and rethink an initiative, weigh things a bit and decide on a new plan of action.
Just this week I was approached by a teacher in the English Dept. who wanted to broaden her students' awareness of the variety of resources we have on offer. Sometimes it makes sense to listen to a book, sometimes reading it is a better fit. For reluctant readers an audio book can provide a enjoyable respite, in which they can experience the story through an audio rendition, pick up new vocabulary, visit new destinations and live amazing experiences all through the eyes of the characters in the book.
We set up two lessons with the 6th grade today in which we sat down and explored the Playaways, as well as the other digital book collections we have been curating over the last few years. Everyone enjoyed this special reading/listening time. We are hopeful that word will continue to spread, and that our students will continue to use these great resources.
When the new audio books come in we will invite teachers to bring the students down and explore them as well as our online collections in the Useful Resources Section of the Learning Resources Centre Website.
Here is a small collection of images from the visits. For a more complete collection please visit the LRC Facebook page.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Minecraft Project Update-Fortresses and Castles
Where We Are
Our 7th grade students have been moving full speed ahead on their Minecraft projects. These projects involve teams of students, designing a fortress and castle, based on what they learned about such structures in 6th grade. They are using Minecraft to create the structures on the school server. We are one week away from testing them out in survival mode. Students are rushing to get supplies stocked up, ensure that their structures are well fortified, and are busy contriving and building traps for potential invaders. Needless to say there is a lot of strategic thinking going on!
What We Use We opted for Minecraft Edu which was a smart move as it allows the teacher control of a lot of what goes on in-world. Among the various options available are the abilities to freeze students, teleport them back and forth, mute their chat, bring them all in to the teacher, toggle between creative and survival mode and revoke student building as well as student creative mode. I am able to do all of this as well as work with them on our map.
Challenges
We came up against two major challenges when beginning this project. The first involved constant server crashes which occurred when the whole class was logged in. We solved that by initially partnering the students up and then bumping up the memory on the computer that hosts the server. This was a great solution and we have not crashed since!
The second challenge had to do with demonstrating respect for others. With over 100 students playing on one map, on the school server, it can tricky to monitor the goings on. For that reason Student building privileges are limited to class time and after school for one hour. That way i am able to pop in and visit while I monitor behaviour and chat.
Respect for other people's work is vital in an online project, just as it is in real life. Griefing and "trolling", are not unheard of and some kids do partake in it when playing on different servers. I spoke with the students about this upon commencing the project and come back to it in each lesson. Unfortunately, there have been a few cases of griefing and trolling during the project. You can imagine my surprise when I logged in yesterday only to find out that my own structure had also been greifed at one point!
I have to admit that it was a bit disconcerting at first, but these incidents ended up providing the basis for teachable moments. The whole project is about learning to work together online. The issue having hit home provided us with the fodder for a relevant discussion about griefing and trolling .
I have to say that the kids should be commended. They are are amazingly flexible and despite the setbacks many have experienced, they remain very positive and even come in to work after school. They are quick to fix any damage that occurs and and then they move on. Let's face it, many of them, especially the team leaders are experienced gamers and have dealt with these problems before. It is great to see how positive they are about it all.
Our team leaders are doing a fantastic job of running the builds. They organise their teams, direct construction, teach others how to create more advanced constructions, all while working on their own building jobs, designing defence contraptions and meeting with the teacher to discuss the progress and the parameters for testing day.
I was able to capture some video footage in-world, while a few classes worked on their structures. Please have look at the video to see what they have done.
Our 7th grade students have been moving full speed ahead on their Minecraft projects. These projects involve teams of students, designing a fortress and castle, based on what they learned about such structures in 6th grade. They are using Minecraft to create the structures on the school server. We are one week away from testing them out in survival mode. Students are rushing to get supplies stocked up, ensure that their structures are well fortified, and are busy contriving and building traps for potential invaders. Needless to say there is a lot of strategic thinking going on!
What We Use We opted for Minecraft Edu which was a smart move as it allows the teacher control of a lot of what goes on in-world. Among the various options available are the abilities to freeze students, teleport them back and forth, mute their chat, bring them all in to the teacher, toggle between creative and survival mode and revoke student building as well as student creative mode. I am able to do all of this as well as work with them on our map.
Challenges
We came up against two major challenges when beginning this project. The first involved constant server crashes which occurred when the whole class was logged in. We solved that by initially partnering the students up and then bumping up the memory on the computer that hosts the server. This was a great solution and we have not crashed since!
The second challenge had to do with demonstrating respect for others. With over 100 students playing on one map, on the school server, it can tricky to monitor the goings on. For that reason Student building privileges are limited to class time and after school for one hour. That way i am able to pop in and visit while I monitor behaviour and chat.
Respect for other people's work is vital in an online project, just as it is in real life. Griefing and "trolling", are not unheard of and some kids do partake in it when playing on different servers. I spoke with the students about this upon commencing the project and come back to it in each lesson. Unfortunately, there have been a few cases of griefing and trolling during the project. You can imagine my surprise when I logged in yesterday only to find out that my own structure had also been greifed at one point!
I have to admit that it was a bit disconcerting at first, but these incidents ended up providing the basis for teachable moments. The whole project is about learning to work together online. The issue having hit home provided us with the fodder for a relevant discussion about griefing and trolling .
I have to say that the kids should be commended. They are are amazingly flexible and despite the setbacks many have experienced, they remain very positive and even come in to work after school. They are quick to fix any damage that occurs and and then they move on. Let's face it, many of them, especially the team leaders are experienced gamers and have dealt with these problems before. It is great to see how positive they are about it all.
Our team leaders are doing a fantastic job of running the builds. They organise their teams, direct construction, teach others how to create more advanced constructions, all while working on their own building jobs, designing defence contraptions and meeting with the teacher to discuss the progress and the parameters for testing day.
I was able to capture some video footage in-world, while a few classes worked on their structures. Please have look at the video to see what they have done.
Friday, March 22, 2013
Where We Are and How We Have Gotten There
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
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
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.
- 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
- Humanities: 6th Grade Pompeii/Joya de Ceren Project(Videos in Plain English Style)
- Humanities:WW2 e-books(iBooks Author): 8th grade ICT project to run parallel with Humanities
- English: 6th Grade Poetry Books using iPads and Book Creator
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
Friday, March 15, 2013
ABC Students Take a Trip to an Alien Planet
Written by Kenneth Horrocks and Jennifer Garcia
Science took an exciting turn at the ABC this week, as students from Grade 8 explored a virtual planet populated by alien plants and attempted to classify them according to Earthly classification standards. Each student used their own personalised avatar, kept a careful record of each plant identified in an online field notebook, and made a reasoned judgement about the probable taxonomy of each specimen. While exploring the virtual world, they had to content with mountains, carnivorous plants, floating islands and a giant monster pair of eyeballs which chased them around and stuck to their avatar bodies. The activity forms part of an unit called ‘Plants as Organisms’, in which student are expected to learn the fundamental properties and behaviour of plants, and is part of a new initiative in Key Stage 3 science to ‘theme’ traditional units in science in a way which will be engaging and related to current media or events. The theme for this unit is the multi-million grossing movie ‘Avatar’ by director James Cameron.
Planning and preparation for this activity began four months ago and involved staff from both the science and ICT department, as well as a highly talented and dedicated team of ABC students who used their virtual modelling talents to create many imaginative alien plants on Tuesday afternoons as an extra-curricular activity. Of course this is not as good as taking them to a real alien planet, but it is a lot safer and it fits into the modern pedagogical concepts of using problem solving approaches to learning.
The original idea came about when Mr. Horrocks mentioned that he was interested in creating a virtual alien planet. Now this may sound like a rather odd request, but it makes perfect sense if that planet is to be used for Science students to investigate and classify life forms. In less than 10 minutes we had a plan. In fact the idea for the club, the region and work flow for the project all came together very nicely.
We new upon conception that this project would work extremely well in 8th grade science. It just happens that end of each school year the 7th grade learns to navigate and build in-world in an Open Sim grid. This meant that we already had several skilled builders in the current 8th grade. The LRC had already arranged to lease a region on Jokaydia Grid and it made perfect sense to use Jokaydia for the Science project too. ABC Pandora was launched!
The club took off with a small group of dedicated students from 6th to 8th grade, Mr. Horrocks and Mrs. Garcia. The younger students, despite their lack of experience, picked up the new skills very quickly and soon their imaginations took flight. During the 7 weeks that the club ran, he team created a large variety of virtual 3D Alien life forms, out of basic 3D shapes. In doing so, students chose their shapes care, then modified and linked them to others. They applied textures, effects and even scripts if they wanted their creations to move about. The new life forms were placed within the assigned region, in their own small micro systems. There they were then named and cloned. Soon ABC Pandora had morphed into a region rich with alien plant forms, as well as a few very strange creatures and was ready for action.
Here are examples of the forms used by students to take notes and annotate their findings.
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
SketchUp Walk Through Videos in ICT and English
Each year our students work on a piece of writing in English lessons in which they describe a character's mind as a room. Once they are done the recreate these rooms in SketchUp as models, creating some of the components as well, and record a walk through video. This year they worked on rooms for the characters from William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as well as S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders.
The following playlist contains walk through videos from the last 3 years, starting with those which were done in 2013. We hope you enjoy them.
The following playlist contains walk through videos from the last 3 years, starting with those which were done in 2013. We hope you enjoy them.
Friday, March 1, 2013
Book Week 2013-A Look Back on the Week
This Book Week has been a great success.
Our students and staff members across the Secondary school have been very busy reading great books and engaging in plenty of book related activities. The Spanish and English classes that came in busily filled in book blurbs and worked on Reading related activities. Many of the classes that joined us in the LRC during the week, spent their time reading for pleasure on the bean bags and carpet areas.
One of the first events of the week took place on Monday when Mr. Keslake held his annual Book Week Assembly for 6-8th grades. As always it was an exciting event full of stories and sharing by both staff and students. We were so impressed that we have added many of the books that were highlighted at the assembly to our final book order this year.
The Book Fair that has been with us since Wednesday will be packing up this afternoon. We would like to thank them for taking the time to bring their book stalls in, as well as for coming in extra early on Thursday, so that tutors could bring their students down to browse the selection. We would like to thank the students and the book vendors for their Spanish language book donations that were dropped off. The Santa Tecla Children's Library will be very happy to receive their donations.
The churros and handicraft stalls, which were with us as of Monday morning, were very busy all week long, often packing up rather late into the afternoon, once the demand slowed down.
Hilda, our assistant librarian, led a Scavenger Hunt on Thursday in the LRC, which was a wonderful success. It was really exciting to watch our students as they worked through the QR Code clues with the iPads. It was even more exciting to listen to their joyful comments as they came to the realisation that scavenger hunts are really fun! We must hold more scavenger hunts in the future!
Today's Character Day has gone very well and is not over yet. We will be adding the images to our Flickr account as well as our FaceBook Page as the day progresses. Do go in and have a look at all the wonderful ways in which our school has celebrated its joy of reading great books.
Our students and staff members across the Secondary school have been very busy reading great books and engaging in plenty of book related activities. The Spanish and English classes that came in busily filled in book blurbs and worked on Reading related activities. Many of the classes that joined us in the LRC during the week, spent their time reading for pleasure on the bean bags and carpet areas.
One of the first events of the week took place on Monday when Mr. Keslake held his annual Book Week Assembly for 6-8th grades. As always it was an exciting event full of stories and sharing by both staff and students. We were so impressed that we have added many of the books that were highlighted at the assembly to our final book order this year.
The Book Fair that has been with us since Wednesday will be packing up this afternoon. We would like to thank them for taking the time to bring their book stalls in, as well as for coming in extra early on Thursday, so that tutors could bring their students down to browse the selection. We would like to thank the students and the book vendors for their Spanish language book donations that were dropped off. The Santa Tecla Children's Library will be very happy to receive their donations.
The churros and handicraft stalls, which were with us as of Monday morning, were very busy all week long, often packing up rather late into the afternoon, once the demand slowed down.
Hilda, our assistant librarian, led a Scavenger Hunt on Thursday in the LRC, which was a wonderful success. It was really exciting to watch our students as they worked through the QR Code clues with the iPads. It was even more exciting to listen to their joyful comments as they came to the realisation that scavenger hunts are really fun! We must hold more scavenger hunts in the future!
Today's Character Day has gone very well and is not over yet. We will be adding the images to our Flickr account as well as our FaceBook Page as the day progresses. Do go in and have a look at all the wonderful ways in which our school has celebrated its joy of reading great books.
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