Room 402: Year 6

Moving on

2009-07-22T10:57:00.002+02:00

This blog is no longer being maintained. My attention has shifted to http://ictisocs.blogspot.com/

How to make a paper CD cover

2009-06-10T04:56:00.000+02:00

How To Make A CD Cover Using A4 Paper

2009-06-10T04:51:00.000+02:00

How To Make A CD Cover Using A4 Paper

The New Media Literacies, or What do you need to know?

2009-05-12T13:16:00.001+02:00

Members of the research team at Project New Media Literacies discuss the social skills and cultural competencies needed to fully engage with today's participatory culture. Featuring Henry Jenkins, and produced by Anna Van Someren at Project New Media Literacies. See more NML videos at http://techtv.mit.edu/videos

This video is at YouTube. Students won't be able to see it in school.

International Citizenship Week

2009-03-02T14:00:00.000+01:00

We have Kimmie Weeks with us in school this week. In ICT we looked at these web pages:

Kimmie Weeks website: http://www.youthactioninternational.org/yai/
look at this at home so that you can see the videos.
Africa map: http://www.africaguide.com/afmap.htm
Stateris Africa: http://www.mapmsg.com/games/statetris/africa/

Scratch Challenge

2009-02-22T14:33:00.008+01:00

Project "Chasing/Eating" (Pac Man Type Game)

Requirements:

Game must have a main character that the user moves about the screen using the arrow keys on the keyboard.
There must be "food" that the character eats. The food will disappear after the character eats it.

Extras:

The game area must have a maze that the main character must "bounce" off when it touches the maze.
The game keeps score based on the number of food eaten.
Ghosts or evil characters chase the main character.
System for keeping track of the lives of the main character.

Code samples for Chasing/Eating
Step By Step Instructions for Chasing/Eating

Here are some examples from the Scratch Gallery:

Get the donut and the most points

"The way to start the game is press the green flag. To Control: Press the left arrow key to go left. Press the right arrows key to go right. Press the down arrow key to go down. Press the up arrow to go up. The object of the game is to get to the donut at the end with the most points. And get his family for the most points. But don't get caught by the police!!"

This project has 7 sprites and 23 scriptsLearn more about this project

Pacman Eating Bees

"Pacman is hungary and he wants some bees! INSTUCTIONS: Click the green flag to start. The pacman will follow the mouse pointer. Chase the bees around and he will eat them. If you are bored enough, you can get a really high score!"
This project has 4 sprites and 5 scripts. Learn more about this project

Download the latest version of Scratch for Windows or Mac.
Mr. Michaud at Nebo Elementary School wrote the germ of these excellent lessons. My thanks to him, and to Bill Kerr for pointing me to them.

Search, Collect, Evaluate

2008-11-09T10:18:00.000+01:00

Research: Search, Collect, Evaluate from John Hendron on Vimeo.

Hyper-linked stories

2008-09-30T15:48:00.003+02:00

Year 6 has been working with PowerPoint, making hyper-linked stories. First we used the organization charts in PowerPoint to design a simple 7 slide story tree. Then we made a slide for each section of the story, used avatars we had made previously for illustrations, and then hyper-linked the slides together to follow the 4 story lines.

Here is one example from Class 6i:

You can open this story full size at this link.

Year 6 End of the Year Challenge

2008-06-07T18:19:00.014+02:00

Dear Year 6s - are you up for a final challenge? Follow the steps below, and add a page to the Year 6 Media Wiki. You know how to do all the steps involved in this project:

Find a web site by clicking on a link
Right-click on a picture to copy the "image location"
Insert a picture by pasting in the URL
Paste text
Search
Save
Email

That's all you have to know to do the steps below (plus read carefuly). Feel free to work in the summer on this project. You can make more than one page in the wiki, if you like.

Part 1
Go to the NASA image gallery
Choose a picture, and copy the URL of the picture (image location) and paste it into a text editor (like notepad, text edit, or Word) .

Part 2
If that picture were part of a movie, what music would be in the background? What does the picture "sound like"?
Look for music to be the "sound track" for your picture, at these two sites:

http://www.seeqpod.com/
http://www.skreemr.com/

Note down the names of the songs you choose and in a text editor (like notepad, text edit, or Word).

Go to http://www.mixwit.com/ and create a mix of the songs you chose. (You will need to create a free account). Copy the embed code and paste it into a text editor (like notepad, text edit, or Word).

Part 3
Email me requesting membership in the Year 6 media page wiki. Join the wiki. (It's a private wiki for schools, so there are no adds on the pages.) Watch wikispaces email to see how to do that. Clicking on the invitation link will take you this page at wikispaces.
That will take you to the Welcome Page. On the left side will be a tiny link to our page. Click on the cdnyear6 link.

Part 4
When you have joined the wiki, you will see these directions again on the home page, with much more detail. Be sure to read them! Create a new page. Insert your picture, and embed your music. Once you have joined the wiki, you will be able to look at this page for a sample. It has the same picture and music as are here in this blog post.

If you have any questions about how to create a page, add a picture, etc, click on the "How to" link on the left.

Firefox extensions

2008-06-01T07:16:00.003+02:00

When one of the Year 6 French classes started a blog, we realized we need a French spell checker in Firefox. There are many "extensions" or "add-ons" written for Firefox. You can see what has been installed where you are working by going to the menu bar, choosing "Tools" and then "add-ons".

To get dictionaries and spell checkers,

Click on the "get extensions" link, and you will be taken to this page. Search in dictionaries and language pakcs, or search directly for "MySpell French" and "Dictionary Switcher".

Follow the download and installation instructions.

One person knows how...

2008-05-03T17:13:00.003+02:00

Is this true for your family? Who is the one person?

Uploaded to flickr.com on April 27, 2008 by lynetter
Stat comes from a Logitech survey reported back in March: blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=14166

Statistics - what is "average"?

2008-03-24T09:15:00.004+01:00

As part of your Unit of Inquiry, you've collected a lot of numbers, and put them in a spread sheet, using Excel.

Now you want to "do the statistics" on your findings. Read on, to find out about the the "measures of central tendency" for each year group: mean, mode and median. All these have to do with finding the middle ground among a set of numbers, or the "average".

(This video is reposted from YouTube, so that we can see it in class. It was created for Nutshell Math)

Mean

The mean is the sum of all the numbers in a dataset divided by the count. The formula for computing the mean is easy:

mean = (sum of all measurements) / (number of measurements)

This is illustrated with this set of eight numbers:

8,5,3,5,10,7,6,4

These numbers add up to 48, so the mean is:

48/6 = 6

Excel provides a simple function for computing averages, namely the

=average(RANGE)

In Excel the =average(RANGE) function ignores cells containing no data, i.e. cells that contain no data do not contribute anything to the computation of the mean. Cells that contain a zero do contribute to the average.

Median

The Median is value in the middle. (Imagine the line of bushes down the center of a highway. That's called the "Median Strip")

Finding the median is a two stage process. The example uses the same dataset which was used for the mean.

Step 1 - Sort the numbers into ascending order

3,4,5,5,6,7,8,10

Step 2 - Pick the value in the middle

In this case the dataset has an even number of values. The middle numbers are 5 and 6. Take the mean of these to get the median:

(5+6)/5 = 5.5

If the dataset has an odd number of values, the process is simpler as there will be single value. This is illustrated by removing the largest value from the dataset, i.e.

3,4,5,5,6,7,8

The middle value and thus the median is 5.0 (link)

The median is usually easy to compute when the data is sorted and there are not too many numbers. For unsorted numbers, or for lots of numbers, the median becomes quite tedious, mainly because you have to sort the data first.

Excel has a built-in function

=median(RANGE)

Mode

The mode is that observation that occurs most often. It is usually not unique, and is therefore not that often used, but it has the advantage that it applies to numerical as well as categorical variables. As with the median, the mode is easy to find if the data is small and sorted:

Example: Scores from a test were: 1, 2, 2, 4, 7, 7, 7, 8, 9. What is the mode?

The mode is 7, because that number occurs more often than any other number.

Example: Scores from a test were: 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 7, 7, 7, 8, 9. What is the mode?

This time the mode is 2 and 7, because both numbers occur three times, more than the other numbers. Sometimes variables that are distributed this way are called bimodal variables.

For data that consists of lots of numbers, and/or data that is not sorted, the mode, as the median, is cumbersome to compute by hand.

Excel provides a mode formula:

=mode(RANGE)

However, if the cell range consists several numbers with the same frequency (i.e. a bimodal variable as in the second example above) then the Excel =mode(RANGE) function returns only the first (smallest) number as the mode.

If all values occur exactly once, the Excel mode function returns N\A for "not applicable". (link)

Resources for this post were:
Measures of Central Tendency
Basic Math — Mean, Median, Mode, Range
Mean, Median and Mode

Online games for clever minds

2008-03-24T08:05:00.004+01:00

Online games for clever people - these web sites will keep your brains busy:

Questionaut

on the BBC Bitesize site

Falling Sand

Experiment with everything - use the choices at the bottom to change your "drawing tool" and rate that things happen. Check out the screenshots: Pic-1, Pic-2, Pic-3, Pic-4, Pic-5, Pic-6. before you start to get an idea of the possibilities.

Samorost

Samorost 2

Spirograph

Sodaconstructor

Create a moving robot from masses, springs and muscles. This is not simple! Start by looking at some of the creations on the "Play" tab. You can see how they work, and how to modify them.

SymmetryLab Machine

Build animated machines form a simple set of parts. Be sure to click on the "about" button at the top, to understand how it works, where the controlls are, etc.

Data lives forever

2008-01-15T21:32:00.001+01:00

Chris Betcher, a teacher in Sydney, Australia, writes today about how it's "sometimes difficult getting kids to understand the full implications of something as seemingly harmless as putting their photo online. They often don’t realise that, just like The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, once something goes online it is near impossible to remove it." He embedded this video in his post, which originates at cybertipline.com, the National Center for Missing and Exploited children web site.

Programming

2008-01-13T16:00:00.000+01:00

After you solve the Pawns puzzles, and have written some programs using Scratch, you may want to download Alice for your home computer. Alice is a free software that teaches programing in a 3D environment. It is from Carnegie Mellon University, with versions available for Winddows, Mac and Linux.

"Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.

In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course."

Social bookmarking

2007-12-29T18:34:00.000+01:00

Common Craft "... made this video because (they) want others to feel the power of social bookmarking and how it makes websites easier to remember, organize and share."

"This video is focused on Del.icio.us, but you could also try social bookmarking sites like Magnolia or Furl."

To see how it works, look for my tag cloud in the side bar of this blog.
I am keepps on Del.icio.us

Personalizing your iGoogle homepage

2007-12-02T08:27:00.000+01:00

This video gives "...a brief introduction into use the iGoogle feature to personalize a users homepage. The video shows a guided tour of iGoogle and it's many features. It shows how to add and remove gadgets, how to add tab, and how to add themes to your iGoogle page."

You can set your iGoogle page to work in one of 26 available languages. You can add content to your page by installing, an then arranging tiny web sites called "gadgets" or "widgets". There are more than 25,000 gadgets available for iGoogle - experiment, try, add and delete. If a registration is required to use the widget - for example on a game site, be sure to read the Privacy Policy of the site, and decide if you want to give them even your email address.

You might want to organize your page with the tabs feature - all the games on one tab named "Games" or "Fun", all your reference widgits like the dictionary, a translator, Wikipedia (choose your own languages), spell check, WordReference on one tab called "Reference" or "Look it up".
Maybe you would like a "list" tab gadgets to help you get things done. Check out the gadgets on this page. You can set a reminder (about homework due, perhaps?) with this gadget. or add stickie notes to your page with this one.

If you often think of family or friends in another part of the world, you might want this gadget, which can show several analog or digital clocks, each set to a different time zone. This one can show the weather in many different places at the same time.

On this page, you will find a gadget to add to your page that shows you more themes, and allows you to write rules for when they should show - depending on the time of day, the weather, the day of the week, etc. Experiment with these to see how rules work.

Click on this link to see my iSkills video collection and add it to your page, this one for my Science videos collection, or this one for videos that Mrs. B. uses in art class.

links for religion assessment

2007-11-26T08:09:00.000+01:00

You are going to use ComicLife to create a photo story telling about the religion you studied.

Do this:

From the list below, choose the religion you studied, and click on the Flickr-storm link to open a page of photographs.
Open Comic Life. Choose a template for the first page.
Drag the photo you want to use from the photo page to the desktop, and then into Comic Live.
Use speech bubbles or text squares to tell the story.
Don't forget to add your name and class to the page.

For Christianity: Flickr-storm

For Judaism Flickr-storm

For Sikhism Flickr-storm

For Buddhism Flickr-storm

For Taoism Flickr-storm

For Hinduism Flickr-storm

For Islam Flick-storm

How to upload your avatar to gmail

2007-11-18T10:26:00.001+01:00

Here is a visual how-to guide for uploading your avatar to your Google account.
Click on the link to go to a bigger version on the VoiceThread page.

Getting ready to blog

2007-11-18T07:20:00.000+01:00

Bud Hunt, a teacher in northern Colorado, who blogs at Bud the Teacher, maintains a blogging resources wiki, at which you will find this advice (along with lots of other helpful information) in the Student Blogging Handbook:

Never EVER EVER give out or record personal information on your blog. Your blog exists as a public space on the Internet. Don’t share anything that you don’t want the world to know. For your safety, be careful what you say, too. Don’t give out your phone number or home address.
Again, your blog is a public space. And if you put it on the Internet, odds are really good that it will stay on the Internet. Always. That means ten years from now when you are looking for a job, it might be possible for an employer to discover some really hateful and immature things you said when you were younger and more prone to foolish things. Be sure that anything you write you are proud of. It can and will come back to get you if you don’t.
Never link to something you haven’t read. While it isn’t your job to police the Internet, when you link to something, you should make sure it is something that you really want to be associated with. If a link contains material that might be creepy or make some people uncomfortable, you should probably warn them by using a parenthetical note or some other word of caution.

The wiki includes a few sample blogging policies, written by his students. Here is one:

On my group’s blog:

I will only use first names
I will not gang up on others
I am responsible for everything posted on my account
I will only write about things related to my group’s project
I will not post inappropriate or irrelevant links to other sites
I will not mention meeting places
I will not advertise
I will not spam I will not post personal information
I will only offer constructive criticism
I will not plagiarize I won’t post harmful, dangerous, or illegal material
I will not use tOgGlE-cAsE or ALL CAPS
I will use appropriate language
I will not insult others’ ideas
I will not be stupid

Our blogs will be classroom tools, just like paper, pencil, and notebooks. We expect the same responsible behavior on blogs as we do in the classroom. Speech that is inappropriate for class is not appropriate for a blog. W expect you to be a caring, communicating, inquiring, knowledgeable, open-minded, principled, reflective, risk-taking, thinking, balanced blogger.

Safety Tips for Students

2007-10-22T20:30:00.000+02:00

This is a slide from Kim Cofino's presentation to parents in Bankok, based on the Internet Awareness presentation which Mark Wagner created for the Laguna Beach USD under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license. I found it in this post at the Infinite Thinking Machine blog.

Using your blog reader

2007-08-18T06:30:00.000+02:00

"There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start."
Read more here

Click To Play "RSS in Plain English" by Common Craft

You can also see this video at blip.tv, on the creator's site, Common Craft, and on You Tube.

We will be using Google Reader as our feed reader in class.

WebWare writes this about Google Reader:
"Google Reader is a Web-based RSS feed reader. Users can subscribe to as many RSS feeds as they want, then browse them in a lean and simplistic two-pane story browser that feels a little bit like Gmail. RSS feeds give users a visually simplified version of Web content. In addition to photos and text, Google Reader will also display embedded video clips from several popular services."

As part of your Google account, you have a Google Reader. Go to this page for an explanation of how Google Reader works.

To begin, subscribe to these sites:

http://buzz.blogger.com/
http://cdnpypict.blogspot.com/
http://pypict.blogspot.com/
http://cdnpyp6.blogspot.com/

Then go to Google News and enter "energy sources" in the search bar. Click on Search News. In the middle of the page, under "Top Stories" will be the most recent news stories resulting from your search. (You may have to think a bit to understand why they relate to your search!) In the upper right-hand corner of the page, mouse over the little orange rss square. The feeds available will become visible; click on rss. Your Google Reader page will open, with the News Feed in place. Click on the "Subscribe" button, and add the feed to a folder you create named "Energy". Now the fresh news about "energy sources" will come to you several times a day.

You can do this for each of the Units of Inquiry, or anything else that interests you (perhaps you want to follow the news about Manchester United?)

Create an avatar

2007-08-17T07:34:00.003+02:00

You can use an avatar on many of the social network web sites - a digital representation of you. (Check out the definition here.) Creating an unusual image is a great way to give yourself a unique identity, without putting your real photograph on the web. At the left is my new avatar.

At the Simpsons movie site go to the "Create Avatar" tab, choose "New Character" (You don't need to log in to do this).

When you are finished, click on the envelope icon at the bottom of the screen, and "Send to a friend" - that is, send it to yourself! Or, you can do a screen shot, too. We will add it to your Picasa Web Album, so that you can use it easily.

OR

You might prefer to be a character from South Park. Go to this web page. Using the diagram on the left, create your person. Click "save" when you are finished, and follow the directions (which are to take a "screen shot". South Park Studios also has an avatar creator. Save with a screen shot.

OR

Maybe you'd like to be a cartoon character? Go to this site and create yourself! The email feature does not work (and you wouldn't use it anyway, would you??). Save with a screen shot, and paste it into a picture editor. Then crop it down to your avatar and save.

(A Screen shot -- A screen shot (sometimes called a screen capture) is a copy of the screen's contents that can be saved as a graphics file or copied into a document or graphics editor.)

This video on TeacherTube was made by a teacher to show his class how to create and save an avatar on a PC. (disregard the last part when the narrator talks about "saving to your class folder" - obviously, if you do this at home on a PC, that doesn't apply!)

OR

If you like animals, you might visit the Build Your Wild Self page of the New York Zoos and Aquarium web site. When you've built your wild self, choose "print your wild self", and then right click and "save picture as" to preserve your creation.

At http://www.reasonablyclever.com/mini/kidsafe.htm you can create yourself in Lego. The only way to save your picture is with a screen shot.

This wiki page has many more examples from other web sites.

Furnish your blog

2007-08-15T18:11:00.001+02:00

After you have created your blog, you may want to add elements to the side bar. Remember that anything you add must be in good taste, and acceptable to our school community. If you don't want your teachers, parents or relatives across the world to see it (or you yourself to see it 5 years from now), leave it out. Blogger offers several page elements on your blog's Template tab.

You may also want to choose a clock at

ClockLink.com
"Clocks that you can easily embed in your web page. All you need to do is simply paste the tag on your web page. Our clock will display the city name of your choice if you choose. You can also choose a time zone for your clock so it will show the correct time. Decorate your website with our clocks!"

WorldTimeSaver.com
"Free analog web clock showing the current time where you are, simply by adding some HTML code to your page or template. It will update automatically for the Daylight Saving Time rules for your selected location. It's FREE and customizable, too!"

To add a clock to your blog, follow the instructions on the clock site to copy the HTML code, and then from your blog's Dashboard choose "layout", then Template, "Add an Element", then "HTML".