The Teacher Toolbox

I once enquired of the Head of Curriculum of a school why she thought the Yr 5 & 6 cohort had no real understanding of what Division actually was. Her reply told me a fair bit.

‘You know how it is Adrian, by the time you do Addition in Term One, Subtraction in Term Two and Multiplication in Term Three those last 10 weeks of school just get too busy to do Division properly.’

I believe the modern term all the cool kiddies are using is WTF

That said, I’m trying to pull a friend’s child back from the abyss that is Math Anxiety. We’ve been ‘exploring’ & ‘playing’ with maths concepts.  We’ve done heaps with metacognition/self talk, error analysis, heaps of demonstrations with concrete materials & practise moving from concrete to symbolic representations then we put together the comic strip above.

I’m fond of ‘enforced creativity’ as a way of producing unique ideas. We took the PC version of Comic Life (yes one does exist) and a pretty random set of machinima images from my Dawn of War collection and dropped them into the program. We then started brainstorming ideas for how we could create a comic about Division. NB the last speech bubble is a little tongue in cheek as my student knows that beyond simple division most of us use a calculator

cheers

Adrian

Oh, & I’ll deal with this comment another day ‘Adrian, that’s all just ‘bells and whistles’. ‘Real’ teachers ‘don’t have time’ to do stuff like that. We have a ‘test’ to ‘cram’ for’.

I love to have a performance focus in my classrooms and the Free Harvest Sound Effects Player software adds a whole extra dimension to any play, readers’ theatre or poetry recital.

I’m with @BernajeanPorter when she says that when telling & performing stories we are looking for more than ‘polite listening’ from the audience. I believe we need the audience to engage with the performance and the actors need to explore the production values that will make an ‘ordinary’ piece of text ‘extrodinary’.

I also believe the message we send to students when we are prepared to get outside our comfort zones, tinker with new tools and be seen to be doing ‘new with the new’ is very, very important in developing confident creative thinkers.

Check out a few of the tips and tricks I’ve worked out for using this sound effects software and the link to the download over on my website.

Enjoy!

Adrian

Last night I was having a bit of a tinker on the Ipad using Adobe Ideas. It is a simple vector based drawing program with the ability to alter the opacity of colour. The program also allows you to email your ideas directly from within the program. You can also add a photo layer which offers the ability to create a greater variety of artwork.

Pros – it’s FREE!!! 50 levels of undo, email built in, integrates into Photoshop and Illustrator if you email as pdf, great gallery make browsing your work easy

Cons – could do with a text tool, a bit ‘clumsy’ drawing with your finger & manipulating the colour tool is a bit slow.

At the moment I’m still out on weather or not this tool will add to my work-flow. I like the way I can try out different colour schemes but I find pen and paper a much quicker way to explore design. I will however keep experimenting as that is how we discover what works for us.

Dear World,

Here is a  collection of Iphone ‘Art’ apps for you to explore and evaluate. How will you sort the ‘fluff’?

CoolIris, Make a Martian, Eastern Drawing, SketchBook X, Pop Art Light, Spawn Lite, Art Gallery, Solid Dots,
Photoshop Mobile, Dash of Colour, ArtLite, SketchMee, Poly Gra Lite, SculptMaster 3d free, For All Seasons & Random Pose.

Can you do me a favour and add your favourite Iphone Art apps as a comment.

cheers

Adrian

I’ve been playing Mini Ninjas with Mr 10 for about a week now. During this time we’ve been taking a few screen shots of the action using Fraps 99. Above is my first comic using Mini Ninjas as the machinima engine.

Thoughts welcome.

.

I find using scaffolds a great way to introduce children to alternative ways of writing poetry and exploring creative process.

Here is my lastest scaffold

The Haunted House
_______________s,
_______________s
___________
Door ____________ slowly open,
______________ them in
a ____________,
a ____________,
a distant _(animal) (noise it makes)
_________,
________,
_____________ comes to a _____________ halt
and ____________!
________(sound) __________(sound) _________(sound)
Door ___________s shut
Only to open when the next unsuspecting
______________ comes along.

And you can explore the who process with your students at this page The Haunted House Sound Poem.

Enjoy

I once heard an interview with the Kiwi songwriter Neil Finn where he talked about how a ‘mistake’ can lead to a whole new song. As I tinker with new software I often find, when something is not quiet going the way I plan, I end up exploring a whole new tangent and produce something completely unexpected. I’m not saying that these tangets are worthwhile, but they are often ideas that would never have been produced without the initial mistake.

Recently my son and I have been experimenting with a plugin for the Steam games Half Life 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 called Garry’s Mod. The mod allows you to manipulate your objects and characters to create scenes independent of the gameplay. It is what the Machinima community use to make Half Life 2 movies like Civil Protection.

Initialy I found it really hard to pose this character in a chair and that sparked the idea for this single panel cartoon.

So where do we encourage our students to make mistakes and then to value them?