Monthly Archives: September 2015
Blogging Bootcamp Week 5
As usual we will have Glow Meets at 2:00pm and 4:15pm on Tuesdays.
http://meet.glowscotland.org.uk/bootcamp.
Recordings:
2:00pm meet
4:15 meet
Technical
This week we will be focusing on posting audio and video. It is also a chance to ask any technical questions. Please bring these up in the Glow Meet or better still drop me a mail so that I can be prepared.
We will also be looking a ways you can join in with communities of bloggers: Making connections Quad blogging, #shareourlearning, the local and global community.
Handbook of Digital Storytelling from Digital Commmonwealth team is a resource which helps people develop digital storytelling skills. Highly recommended.
Discussion
Review of your blogging so far. What has worked? How are you going to take this forward? Review classroom organisation.
I would also like to collect some feedback on the bootcamp, I will probably send out yet another email next week with either some questions or a link to a survey.
Challenges
- join #shareourlearning
- Make a post using audio or video
- Review of bootcamp
- Continue to comment and connect.
Future Me!
Primary 7 have recently completed artwork and writing on the topic ‘Future Me’.
Budding Artists
At the start of term, we began by sketching to create half of a self portrait. We have slowly improved on our observation skills throughout the making. We used mirrors to observe every detail from above our shoulders and have focused on key parts of our faces to make it as realistic as possible.
The other half of the face was much trickier! We had to imagine what we might look like in the future, in the year 2035. The illustrations also included some ideas of what we want to be like in the future. For example, I drew some sports equipment as I would like to be either a PE teacher or an Active Schools Coordinator and Conor drew some dinosaur bones as his dream career is in Palaeontology. The finished designs are really brilliant! Some of the class look quite different in their projections of themselves in 20 years! Each one gives a really good insight into their future hopes and dreams.
Dear Future Self
During our writing lesson, we wrote an inspirational letter to our future selves so that in twenty years we can look back at them to see what goals we have achieved. First, we brainstormed ideas and advice we would like to add to our letter to make sure it was filled with information, advice and questions. It is a lot more complicated than a regular piece of writing as addressing yourself in the future is tricky! Everyone’s letter included; advice to themselves, their future career expectations and any goals or hopes and dreams they wanted to fulfil.
We have created a display of our observational drawings and letters so that any visitors to our classroom can see the finished product!We thought of some qualities and skills we wanted our future self to have and arranged these words around our hard work. On Monday, we had some International delegates visit the school and they had some positive feedback to give about our work.
All together, everyone enjoyed the task – especially drawing the portraits! We hope everyone keeps their letters safe so we can look back in 20 years and see how far we have come!
Orla and Conor, P7
Blogging Bootcamp Photography Challange
P7 enthusiastically took part in a Blogging Bootcamp Photograpgy Challange. We were given a list of interesting photo challenges and we had to work as a group to plan, take and upload our pictures. It certainly was a challage! We were very impressed at the imagination of our class mates and our photography skills were not to bad at all. Take a look at our list of interesting photos and see if you can match the titles to each picture.
Using Audio and Podcasting
As part of Week 5 we will be challenged to post some audio or video. Here are some resources to help with audio.
A 5 minute introduction to Audacity, a free cross-platform audio recorder.
Let There Be Light!
Scran celebrates National Poetry Day 2015 with a series of movie montages celebrating this year’s theme of light – tying in with the UNESCO Year of Light – and offering inspiration from the archives.
It’s National Poetry Day on Wednesday 8th October. This annual event celebrates poetry in all its forms across the country. This year the theme is light, marking the United Nations International Year of Light 2015.
To celebrate and provide inspiration for your own creative works, Scran has delved deep into its digital collections and found a range of material which explores light in interesting ways. Three two-minute movie montages have been created so far, using still images, moving images and sounds from www.scran.ac.uk. These are now available to view on the site.
Light and Dark layers rural landscapes, urban landscapes and seascapes with imagery of Scottish skies showing the changing light at different times of day. Human experiences are evoked through film and oral testimony and include torchlit processions and memories of wartime blackouts. Poetry and song add atmosphere to the piece.
Man Made Light explores ways in which light is generated through a range of human activities, including domestic lighting, lighting for safety at sea and on the roads and light and heat generated through industrial processes. There are Oral testimonies from former factory workers and archive footage is juxtaposed with contemporary colour film.
In Light and Shadows, grainy black and white stills of early 20th century cityscapes are set against the wide open spaces of the Highlands. Human figures and forms in nature cast interesting shadows in their surroundings. Poetry readings echo themes of darkness and light.
There’s a fourth and final movie to come – watch this space for more information.
Watch all the Inspiration from the Archives movies on Scran
Try these other websites to find more resources to support teaching and learning for National Poetry Day 2015: Scottish Poetry Library | Education Scotland
Image taken from Sun being obscured by black clouds © Edinburgh Film Workshop Trust / Comataidh Craolaidh Gaidhlig (sync rights CoG): Copyright owner: Computerised Time-lapse Library. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk
SLF 2015
We are blogging live from the Scottish Learning Festival. Scott, Ellie, Mrs Hunter and I have just presented about how we blog in the classroom . We talked about why we blog, how we organise it and how we write our posts. It was a bit nerve-wracking but we were confident and spoke with a loud clear voice! At the end everybody told us that they enjoyed our presentation and going to look at our blog. We have enjoyed looking at all the stands and we got to control a robot using coding! We also loved getting lots of freebies like pens, badges, bags and pencils!
Read all about it from John Johnson here!
How to Knit using a Loom
HereToday Ellie taught us how to knit using a special loom. Ellie has been busy making lots of knitted hats for babies and we were all really interested in how she made them. Ellie plans to hand them in to a baby unit in our local hospital – how thoughtful! What a wonderful Whinhill girl! Here is a ‘how to’ video so you can learn to knit too!
Here is what Ellie had to say: It was so fun creating my hat ‘how to’ video for you. I love to knit. As I said in the tutorial, I am making the little baby hats for the babies in the hospital. This great idea came to my mind and I thought, why not? You can get all different sizes of looms. It is so handy to have this equipment because if it’s a cold wintery day you never have to go out and buy a hat why not knit one? Thank you so much for watching and if you did watch I hope this tutorial helped you. Please leave a comment below! By Ellie
Making a gallery and inserting a video – Nature
Here is our first gallery.
Here’s a video (or two) we made earlier!
https://animoto.com/play/CeMirB0u5qMgMWPve5jO1w
Nature by Thomas, Cian , Kenneth, Chloe and Lucy
https://animoto.com/play/CdQE33IcpDoP2FMd6WpBKw
Bug Club by Justin, Kylie, Christopher and Ace.
Harvest at Grandtully
Last school year, before the summer holidays we planted tiny seeds in the ground. We gave them some water and pulled out all the weeds so they would get more sunlight. When we came back to school in August all the seeds had grown. This week we have been harvesting our food.
P1 found potatoes
We used our sounds to call them different names ‘t’ for tatties, ‘p’ for potatoes ‘s’ for spuds
We found some very, very tiny carrots
We found lots of neeps!
We are going to put them in our soup for our harvest showcase.
We have two apple trees, we had to pull down the branches and stand on our tip toes to pick the apples. We dried them and wrapped them in newspaper to keep them nice and fresh.
P1 used their drawing skills to tell the story of how they picked the apples.
From P1-3
