Week 4: Telling stories with inspiration

This week we visited the ABC's Dust Echoes website and picked an aboriginal story to retell in pictures. 

You can see my work above, I chose to retell the Brolga Story.

You can check out the Dust Echoes website at : http://www.abc.net.au/dustechoes/dustEchoesFlash.htm

I feel compelled to warm though that some of the stories and their accompanying videos were a little grizzly and violent. I don't think this particular site is suitable for all ages, you could always adapt the activity to a different text though. This exercise again used the program Inspiration, which we looked at in week 1.  The activity was another good example of how Inspiration can be used to break down information/ideas. Though this time we were breaking down a story and retelling it using pictures and our own words. The pictures I used were actually screenshots from a video.

We could use this activity with our students as a comprehension exercise to see if the students have grasped the main ideas of a story. This exercise has the benefit of being both linguistic and visual, and can help students to understand the concepts of narrative and plot development. It also highlights the fact that it is not only written stories that have a narrative, that narrative still applies to the film medium. 

By applying this technique to a culturally relevant story, like those on the Dust Echoes website, we can integrate this activity into humanities lessons.

The other activity we completed in this workshop was to make an Excel graph of the number of each colour of M&Ms in a bag.  I am a big fan of chocolate, and I imagine a lot of kids are too so I think this activity would go well in the classroom. I'm not sure if all the parents would approve though, childhood obesity is such a concern these days, with schools are promoting healthy lunchboxes and banning junkfood in the tuckshop. If the idea of promoting chocolate deters you, again this activity could be adapted. I remember when I was in primary school we counted the cars that drove past the school over a set amount of time and noted the colour of each car using a tally sheet. The information collected from this could then be graphed in excel.

Whilst I had used Microsoft Excel previously, I hadn't realised that you could add pictures to your graphs and tables. It was a good reminder that there is always more to learn.

The obvious place to integrate Excel into the classroom would be during maths lessons, but also science as tables and graphs are often used to represent and compare data collected.

Below is the M&M table and graph I created in Excel: