Today we started our collaborative inquiry with Mrs Burton’s class. We used etherpad to share our brainstorming about what the word ‘endangered’ means to us. Then we put all of our brainstorming into a wordle. We had some fun choosing how we wanted our wordle to look & we made a custom colour scheme for it. Here is what we came up with.

Image from: Wordle

Well, that was a quick holiday!

Welcome back to Term 3 – a busy term but not as busy as last term, hopefully.

We are going to be sharing an inquiry unit, on the human impact on other species and how all life is interdependent, with another Year 6/7 class at another school. This would be the school where I taught last year. It will be a challenge to work across the two schools but I’m sure we can do some great problem-solving to make it work. We’re hoping to organise an excursion to the Maritime Museum at Port Adelaide as well as a Port River dolphin cruise.

Today, we started reading a book called “The Name of this book is Secret” by Pseudonymus Bosch. It’s a mystery, but a humorous mystery judging by the first couple of chapters. Thanks to Chris who found it in the library and thought that it would make an interesting class novel. I wonder who the author is – maybe it’s even a famous author that we all know. What do you think? Any ideas, or do you need to read a bit more first?

I hope you are all enjoying your holidays and getting to do some of the things you’d planned. I’ve been to a 2 day conference run by CEGSA (Computers in Education Group of South Australia). I came across some interesting programs there.

Scratch is a free program for making your own interactive stories, games, art and animations. I didn’t manage to get to the workshop to actually have a go with it but I’ve downloaded it and hope to have a play during the next week. There are some examples of Scratch projects on the website. There’s a special day called Scratch Day too. This year Grant High School in Mt Gambier worked with Year 6/7 students from some local primary schools to help them create Scratch projects.

The other program I disovered was Inkscape, a vector graphics editor. The program needs to be downloaded but that can be done quickly as it isn’t very big. I had a play with Inkscape at the conference. It is a little complicated but I think we could have some fun using it. There are some great examples of graphics made with it here and here.

I’ll work on getting these two programs on our school network. In the meantime here are a couple of online drawing/painting programs you may like to have a play with.

Bonomo

Have fun! Let me know what you think of them.

I can’t believe how quickly these last 2 terms have gone. I’ve had a great time with my new class (in a new school) and I think we’ve got to know each other really well. We’ve been extremely busy – as have just about all the other classes I know!

We started this blog at the beginnning of the year and now have a number of students running their own blogs. We’ve had over 4,500 visitors and I know that the students are counting until we get to 5000 as I impulsively promised them a celebration if we ever got to 5000. To be honest, I didn’t really think it was much of a gamble – it seemed such a lot of visitors to expect, but we’re almost there!

Before we finished this week I asked students to visit www.wallwisher.com to share their reflection of these last 2 terms. Unfortunately some of them were unable to contribute as the site doesn’t work with IE 6, & that’s what we have at school, and what many of my students have at home. Nevertheless here are the reflections of those who managed to use the site.