Week 4- Dust Echoes & M&Ms

I never knew traditional Aboriginal stories were so diverse, interesting, beautiful, complicated and, somtimes, gruesome! Nevertheless, it was really fascinating doing this activity that involved summarising a traditional Abrigonal story into it's most important elements. We used the Dust Echoes website from the ABC main page and it in itself was very beautiful and engaging visually, I believe students would be really intrigued and stimulated by this website.

Here is my summary of the Aboriginal story called 'The Mimis', done using Inspiration.

Trying to reduce a whole story into 6 or 7 main points is quite difficult but using Inspiration was great to show the story visually. It was also effective for doing something 'literate' without doing writing explicitly.

Understanding a story does not always relate to being able to write about it, being able to know the order of the story and what the most important sections are suggest great skills at being literate to me! One of the major criticisms of ICT is that it does not foster literacy skills as there is little actual reading/analysing or writing/synthesising when students are on a computer but using the above activity as evidence you can see that using technology can indeed build strong literacy skills.

Graphing M&Ms is a good idea! It might be hard if there are kids with allergies but my experience, as a teacher and a chocolate lover, tells me that using something with sugar will engage kids everytime. Asking lots of questions before they even open the packets kids thinking....does colour of the bag reflect how many of that colour are in there? How many in your bag? How many of that colour in the whole class? You can use Excel but kids can do this so easily on butcher's paper and coloured squares of paper or coloured markers. Excel allows for a lot of fiddling with the colours, layout, patterns etc.

Using Excel might be a bit confusing for primary school kids, I found it difficult to work out how to make my bar graph look the way I wanted it, I couldn't work out how to change each each section of each bar to coincide with the colour of each M&M. Overall, Excel is great, especially for graphing information and building knowledge in maths or science as students can insert information they have investigated then produce a visual respresentation of that information to show the class. Being able to see something in the form of a graph can also help students who struggle to understand information simply in written form, these may be more kineasthetic or visual learners.