Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Comic Life and Kid Pix

Jennie at Sacred Heart wants to use Kid Pix for the students to respond to work with. She plans to use photos of the children and have them write and draw on these and save the files for her to put together as a slide show. She can also have the students record their responses verbally.

We talked about some of the difficulties for very young children to tell a story using Kid Pix, to make a slideshow involves a few steps which can be a bit tricky, it involves quite a few steps, including careful saving of files which in the excitement that students have in making their story can be forgotten. Then they are disappointed at the end when they come to put their story together and can't locate the files for their slide show. Obviously with teaching and time the students would manage this. But we looked at Comic Life as an alternative, if students were wanting to put a story together.

At the virtual syndicate meeting yesterday (8th June) we looked at work done by children using Comic Life. We discussed the benefits of using one tool very well and not using a programme and then saying 'that's done' next thing. There is so much learning possible in Comic Life and in many programmes and ICTs, we need to ensure we make the most of this. Dave has put together a great resource on the wiki for Comic Life. We talked about showing students quality examples of work and really helping them to understand what is possible with the tools we are asking them to use. I have blogged before about compound learning, if you put the effort into teaching students to use a tool, letting them do something with it, you should continue to let them push the boundries with this so you get the learning benefit out of it, for the teaching effort you have put in. Too often we move on to something new instead of capitalising on what we've done.

This is often called deep learning, this happens best when you get students to transfer their learning to another context or problem, usually a rich task. So working with the same content but in a different way, perhaps getting students working with a novel you have read through drama, then taking pictures of this and having them use the pictures (in Comic Life) to retell the story in a different way. In doing this you give students two experiences to compare, this is where they would draw rich reflections on their learning. Just because you have used this teaching/ experience sequence once does not mean you wouldn't reuse it. If something works well we should reuse it. Obviously you need to add something fresh so things don't get tired but I think that if you are constantly doing new things, things get hard and we can focus on elements of activities which are not really meant to be the learning focus. In Queensland Government's New Basics Curriculum, assessment is based on these types of learning experiences (rich tasks).

We had a few timing and technical issues this visit but next visit, Jennie and I will nut out what she can measure, so that she knows that these learning experiences are making a difference for her class.

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