Charlotte Has Proved Benjamin Franklin Right!

This time last year, the staff at TAPS  developed the e-Learning vision we want for our learners.

Connect ........Learn..............Innovate..................Share

Kotuitui..............Ako.................Auaha.......................Tohatoha

I was staring at this vision as I was sitting at home tonight in front of my laptop.  I was busy completing a review of the digital e-learning plan at TAPS for 2015, that is due in tomorrow.

I hear a 'bing' as a new e-mail arrives in my inbox.  It is from Mrs Scott (Charlotte's mum).

Over the past 3 weeks, Charlotte has been involved in learning how to make StopMotion. Today she went home and made her own StopMotion movie.  

These are the moments that keeps me in teaching.  It is those times when students take what they learn at school and go out into the 'big wide world' and use those skills.

Charlotte, 

Thank you for proving Benjamin Franklin, one of the world's most 

famous inventors, right!

AND

Thank you for sharing your learning with the world!

Our Final Session For The Year

Today was our final session for the year and we FINALLY finished our StopMotion movies.  Congratulations to Bobby, Viktor, Jackson, Lily, Yasmeen and Charlotte for your movies.

Jake The Snake

By Lily, Yasmeen and Charlotte

A Silly Slippery Snake

By: Jackson, Viktor and Bobby

We had lots of comments from Mahutonga and Senna's movie last week.  One comment came from Mahutonga's Aunty Riria.  She shared some of her favourite StopMotion Movies:  Here are her links:

• GULP   ~   https://youtu.be/ieN2vhslTTU
• How Gulp Was Made   ~   https://youtu.be/fza5QdTfyxs
• DOT  ~  https://youtu.be/CD7eagLl5c4
• How Dot Was Made  ~  https://youtu.be/XTbzSiwbRfg

I am so proud of all the efforts all the students have put into their one hour a week with me.  So engaged ... so focussed ... so keen to learn.  Looking forward to seeing all your progress and learning in Syndicate 3 in 2016.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Inserting Screencasts into Blogs

Today I made a screencast and inserted into my blog.

My Kitty Poem (stop motion movie)

Mahutonga and Senna worked very hard today as they were away last time we worked together as a group.  Today's learning tasks:

• Select an animal poem
• Create the characters with playdough
• Choose other items to help tell the story
• Take 150 photos to make the stop motion movie
• Practice reading the poem and decide who is going to say what line
• Record their voices
• Choose background music

Mrs T uploaded it onto YouTube ....  

Here is their final product.

The Making of our Slithery, Slidery, Scaly Old Snake Stop Motion Movie

Today we were on our own ... Mrs T said today was the day we had to practice what we learnt last week.  

Viktor
I had to remember to move the snake only a little bit.

Jackson
I had to remember to only take photos when no one was in the background.

Sienna
To take 5 photos before I moved my snake a little bit.

Lily
I had to remember not to move the setting of my movie.  Only move the snake a little bit.

Charlotte
I had to remember to take 250 photos to make my movie.

Yasmeen
I had to remember to move all the parts slowly and only little bit.

Our First iMotion Movies

Today the students were given the challenge of creating an iMotion movie using lego as their materials

They had to work collaboratively in ...

• deciding what they were going to create.
• moving the pieces into place.
• following directions from the camera operator.
• decide and share out the tasks to complete the challenge within an hour.

Viktor and Jackson giving direction to Bobby (not seen)

Here are our first attempts at iMotion movies.

Our Google Slides Stories

The student's have finally finished their shoebox stories.  It has been an amazing learning journey for both teacher and students.

The digital skills they have been learning and practicing:

• Logging into Chrome and Google
• Accessing their work in their Google Drive
• Creating mind maps to plan their writing - MindMeister
• Writing a script in Google Docs
• Selecting their work - Ctrl + A
• Copying their work - Ctrl + C
• Pasting their work - Ctrl + V
• Publishing their work in Google Slides
• Inserting their photos from their Google drive.

Here are our digital stories published on Google Slides:

Yasmeen, Lily, Senna and Vikor's  will be uploaded onto the blog soon.

The first BLOG written by the students - NOT Mrs T

We love coming to this group.
This is the best thing at school.
Mrs t helps us learn new things.

We learnt to screencast. Screencasts help us to teach each other how to do things on the computers.

We have also learnt how to write on google docs and then put our work into google slides and all of this belongs in our google drive.

She helps us log onto our computers.
Luckily she's there when we need her.
She trusts us
She always gives us good support. 

We are goggle ninjas!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Written by:  Yasmeen, Charlotte, Lily, Senna & Vikor
(Bobby, Jackson and Mahutonga were creating books on the iPad called Book Creator)
   

The Students Have Got Me Working Overtime.

I was hoping to have all the student's screencasts up this afternoon.  However, I have been bamboozled.  

A weekend of 'Wondering & Discovering' for me.  

Watch this space and I will hopefully have them up tomorrow.

Another Exciting Learning Day

Wow! What an exciting and very busy day. 
Next week some of us will be ready to launch our first digital stories on this blog.

Mrs Tautari-Scott learnt: 

• not to video with sunlight behind the students. 
• to get all the students to 'turn their volume up'.

Have a great week everyone.

The Writing Has Begun

Today we started to write our digital story using Goggle Docs.  We had to follow our Mindmeister plan.  Mrs T also showed Jackson and Lily how to get their Mindmeister back when they were accidently deleted.

We clicked on file ... Then See revision history 

Some of us have finished our scripts and Mrs T made some comments to help us improve our writing.

Mrs T uses codes for us to follow:
BTD = Blue To Do
PTT = Pink To Think
GFG = Gold For Glory
These codes are just like Miss White and Mrs Gillespie use in our writing books. 

Lily's Story With Comments

If I click on the highlight in my story, the comment will be indented (move in) so I know what comment to read and follow.

After doing the 'nuts and bolts - script writing' we got started on the 'jazzy stuff - publishing our digital stories using Google Slides'. 

We had to:

• write choose a title, 
• write the author  
• choose a background.  
• Insert an image using the tools ... research option

Charlotte's Title Page

WHAT A DAY!

So Whats Our Plan?

One hour sped by so quickly today.  We all brought our special tāonga into  school today (even Mrs T).  She shared her tāonga and writing with us. We can use hers as a model for when we write our script for our digital story.


Click on the Four arrows to make the slide bigger.

The first thing we did was plan what we are going to include in our digital story script.  We used a tool called MindMeister.  We created a brainstorm of all our ideas on our special tāonga / treasure.  

We only had 15 minutes to create our MindMeister brainstorm.  We worked so hard.  Mrs T was the noisy one, Mahutonga had to ask her to be quiet so he could think.  Here are our brainstorms.

If you find it hard to read our brainstorm.  Ask us to show you and we can login at home into our Google account and go to our Google Drive.

Next week we're going 'pull apart' Mrs T's writing and then start writing our script.  We have to remember to bring our shoe box back to school.  Mrs T  told us it's okay to start writing our script before next week.  We just have to remember to use hers as a model.  Hmmmm can we use any 'fancy pancy' words like she did?

Next week we will start:

• writing our script
• learning how to use online thesaurus to help us extend into level 2 vocabulary.  We are going to be able to use amazing adjectives to help build images in our readers mind.

Hopefully in Week 4 we will be starting to publish our photos and record our script into WeVideo.

Our First Day ...

Today our minds are exploding with new knowledge.  

We learnt to log onto the school server 

AND 

sign into our school account.

Each of us has our own Google Drive which means we can do work:

anytime

anyplace 

anywhere

We also made a shared digital story.  We had to introduce ourselves.

Mrs T showed us what are digital stories?
Why we  are going to be writing digital stories?

Here is a diagram for our mums and dads.

We hope you enjoy our first digital story all about our amazing group!