The Grade 6’s are currently busy with an exciting project. Working mostly in pairs, the children wrote a short story aimed at a Grade 2 or 3 child. This story was then typed up in PowerPoint on a maximum of 14 slides, with illustrations (website sources cited). Some groups sourced their pictures from the internet, some drew their own pictures using shapes, some drew their illustrations by hand and scanned them in and one group created scenes with Lego and took photographs of each scene, and inserted them into the presentations. These presentations were then saved in .pdf format and uploaded onto www.youblisher.com, a website which creates online books. Not all the stories have been completed yet, but the children who have uploaded their stories are very excited about the final product because the e-books are flippable and look great – they’re almost like touching a real book! I have created a wiki with a page for each class, in which I will upload all the stories. Once this is done, we will send the link home for the parents to look at and I will “advertise” our stories to my Twitter PLN, to try to garner an audience. The last step in the project will be to invite the Grade 2’s or 3’s over to our IT Centre, where the Grade 6’s will read their stories aloud to their little guests.
This has been quite a long project, but it has been very valuable with the Grade 6’s learning many new skills – not only ICT skills, but interpersonal skills too. It has been great fun!
Our Grade 6’s are writing stories for the Grade 2’s and Grade 3’s. Working in pairs they have had to come up with an age-appropriate story which they have to illustrate too. The Grade 6’s have done this in the past, but this year we are taking the task a little further. These stories will be created in PowerPoint and then saved as PDFs. From there we will upload them to Youblisher (see previous post dated 10/11/2010), to create ebooks. I have shown the children examples of what these books look like and they are very excited to be using this wonderful tool.
I have created a Grade 6 Wiki with a page per class and I will embed these stories into the Wiki. I then plan to ‘advertise’ these stories to my Twitter PLN in the hope that other classes from around the world will pop in and read the stories and make comments (positive ones, I hope!). This project excites me and I know the children are excited too – fact, I have a Grade 6 class in the lab as I type, and there is a buzz second to none going on in there!