Dreamtime / Excel

Dreamtime stories
Today we were introduced to a website. www.abc.net.au/dustechoes is a website focusing on indigenous Australian dreamtime stories. These stories are told in video form through the use of excellently vivid graphics. They can provide an excellent lead into learning about the indigenous Australian people and links in with Humanities domain in VELS. Note some of these videos may not be appropriate for classroom use due to the adult themes involved.

Using Inspiration, screen shots of the video and a little cutting and pasting I have created a retell of the video. This retell method enables creativity and links to ICT domain. The value in this activity comes through students needing to consider the main points to the story, and to which screen shots to use. They will gain a really good understanding of their chosen story, and have a creative output to be proud of. A possible follow up activity could be for the students to present their retell to the class and then show the actual video, then compare the two and open for discussion. Another follow on activity could be to act out the stories in the class. Alternatively they could be used as a tool to develop prediction and inferring skills. I'd imagine this working by swapping retells with other students and uncovering the images one at a time. After each image is revealed students need to predict or infer as much as they can. Obviously this won't work if everyone is doing the same story or has already viewed them all online. Thus thinking ahead would make it wise to pick a story each for the retells.



Microsoft Excel
On the left you will see a basic collection of data, a graph that has been prepared and an image inserted to make it look attractive. It uses the widespread and extremely powerful software tool Microsoft Excel, which forms part of Microsoft's office package.

This is an example of an output that could be achieved in a primary school lesson. This covers elements of chance and data and integrates technology. M&M's are used in this example although you could use a lot of focuses eg. hair colour, cars that drive past. It would be wise not to bring attention to things which may cause discomfort to the students eg. weight, friendship group.

This is a good introductory lesson into creating a chart. A suitable follow up, could be to prepare a football tipping chart. This would involve feature such as basic functions such as 'sum' and 'average', preparing a more advanced table, sorting and a more advanced chart. You could even introduce macros if you were game. Microsoft Excel's potential is massive. At the end you could pick the best work and use it to record the footy tipping results for the year.

If the cost of this software is an issue an alternative is availible. There is an open source (free) software package called Open Office. This includes a Excel equivalent called 'Calc'. Is available for a free download here.