WEEK 4

Inspiration Task (Dreamtime) & M&Ms Task

This week’s lecture was focused on educational soundness in the digital age and the opportunities the digital revolution has provided in education. This includes improving learning outcomes, equipping students with the skills and knowledge to use technology and it provides an opportunity for collaboration worldwide. I believe there are multiple benefits in introducing students to a digital environment in the classroom including; multiple pathways and starting points, instant feedback and it combines text, audio, video, graphics and animations into one resource.

For the first half of this week’s workshop Greg set us the task retelling a dreamtime story through the software program Inspiration 8 IE. The learning objectives of the activity was to select a dream time story from the Dust Echoes series (available at, www.abc.net.au/dustechoes/) to retell only including the key parts of the story. If used in the classroom as a activity for students to complete it requires students to identify what parts of the story merit focus and understanding, by giving them a limited amount of points they can pick they will need to thoroughly read an comprehend the story and use a process of elimination to determine the information essential to the story’s message.

For the activity I chose the dreamtime story, “The Be” which highlighted the importance of kinship and identification with a community. As the story summary explains this story is about a mysterious stranger avoids entering the camp of an aboriginal tribe and instead he becomes someone feared by the tribe’s people. It is not until he is confronted by two tribal elders that he discovers that he is related to the people and finally has a place where he belongs. The underlying message of “The Be” is about belonging to a community and self discovery, teaching the students about accepting people for who they are and belonging to a community of people of different backgrounds and personalities.
Below is the mind map I created using Inspiration with a number of parts from the story which I believe are important to message the story is trying to portray.

The second half of the workshop was focused on maths activities and how technology can be integrated into the subject to enhance the learning experience and environment for students. The activity was focused on using Microsoft Excel to design a spreadsheet for M&Ms and the colours that appear in the package. I agree this is a great ICT activity that all students enjoy especially when they get to eat the M&Ms afterwards. I have included the excel spreadsheet that we completed in pairs during the workshop that shows the amount of M&Ms in a packet and how many of each colour. Students could take this activity one step further and conduct a survey of the classrooms favourite M&M colour. This would give students practice in recording data they gather making the activity an active process as they are involved in all stages of the process.