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Sand drawing used to give WWII History Lesson

Kseniya Simonova is a Ukrainian artist who just won Ukraine's version of "Britain's Got Talent" in August 2009.

She uses a giant light box, dramatic music, imagination and "sand painting" skills to interpret Germany's invasion and occupation of Ukraine during WWII. Apparently Kseniya started drawing with sand after her business collapsed because of the credit crunch and she had been drawing for less than a year when she entered Ukraine's Got Talent in August.

The video is very impressive and strangely hypnotizing.

As well as it being inspirational to watch it would also make an interesting lesson starter.

(You Tube video below)

More classroom comic creators

I’ve had lots of good feedback on my original post about Crating Comics in the classroom with tools like Comic Brush, Pixton and PowerPoint. As a result I have been sent a couple more links to some great on-line comic creators.

The first link was from Alessio Bernardelli (@asober on Twitter) – Alessio also write an excellent education blog which gives his perspective on education as an Italian working in the Welsh Valleys.

Alessio told me about the Read, Write and Think Comic Creator.

The Read, Write and Think Comic Creator is quite a good little flash based tool that allows you to change backgrounds, add characters, speech bubbles and props. You can make 1, 2, 3 or 6 section comics that appear hand drawn.

The disadvantage of the creator is that you can’t save the comics to come back to them at a later date or export them as a picture file. The website does allow you to print the comics off.

Anyone tried using this particular generator with children?

The second comic generators that I was told about came from Jonathon Wylie who writes the Education Technology Blog. Jonathon pointed out the Marvel Superhero Create your own Comic Generator. Its fantastic, you can create 1-3 panel comic strips or books up to 21 pages. You can choose from a variety of Marvel characters to enhance the feel of your very own superhero comic.

The Marvel Superhero comic generator is very intuitive to use – its just a shame that you can’t add your own pictures.

Again, anyone tried using this particular generator with children?

Finally, I was reminded by David Muir that this year is Asterix’s 50th Birthday. There are lots of great resources over on the Official Asterix Website that could be used to help deliver a variety of curriculum areas for example art and design, literacy and modern languages.

Tim Rylands – HHL09 and African Safari

(photo: James Clay)

I’ve heard lots about Tim Rylands and have followed his blog for a long time. Tim is the king of education web links, a clearly a talented teacher, fantastic presenter, PowerPoint Jedi and knowledgeable education consultant. I was lucky enough to meet Tim at Handheld Learning 2009 – I just wish we had more time to chat?

Unfortunately I missed his presentation but I did get a chance to watch the re-run on the Handheld Learning Blip TV channel. The main focus of Tim’s presentation was on the work that he has been doing with the Wii game Wild Earth: African Safari. If you have not played African Safari then it is defiantly worth a look as the education potential of such a resource is outstanding.

Brian McLaren who works as one of our development officers at the Consolarium in Scotland is doing some work with this title at the moment and with time we will get this written up over on the Learning and Teaching Scotland Games Based Learning website.

African Safari is a unique simulation for the Wii based on the PC game from Super X Studios. It is your task to take award-winning pictures of exotic animals in their natural habitats without disturbing them. This includes running with herds of zebra to following hunting lions and scavenging vultures.

The main features of the game include:

• 11 picture-taking missions with both primary and secondary objectives. Inclusding, nvestigating the hyena during a midday thunderstorm, observing giraffes in a hidden valley from a helicopter and meeting a family of elephants as they take care of their young.

• The Wii lets you use the Wii Remote to play from the animal’s perspective in the different games.

• You can come across more than 30 African animals including: cheetah, crocodile, crowned crane, elephant, flamingo, frog, bat, gazelle, giraffe, hippo, hyrax, leopard, lion, ostrich, oxpecker, pangolin, rhinoceros, meerkat, tortoise, trout, vulture, warthog, wildebeest and zebra.

• Multiplayer mode gives players the choice to drive the vehicle or snap photos while playing with anywhere from 1 to 3 friends.

• Photos collected are placed into an animated slide show presentation of informative articles. Players can select their own favorite photos to keep in their portfolio.

• An Impact Meter tracks how much of a disturbance you are to the natural habitat. If you disturb too many animals or get to close to them, your Wii Remote will rumble at varying degrees, making it harder to take a steady picture. If the Impact Meter becomes completely depleted, you fail the mission.

• There are terrific photo opportunities due to the accurately presented flora and terrain from the Serengeti National Park in Africa. This includes shrubs, flowers, kopjes (rocky outcroppings), streams and lakes. The weather also changes through the day

You can view a trailer for the game below (You Tube):

During his presentation Tim games lots of ideas about how he has used African Safari with classes all over the UK. I have embedded the video of Tim speaking at HHL below:

During his talk he mentions the following links, software and web based tools:

• African Safari – for the Nintento Wii (more details here)

• PowerPoint – In particular Tim mentioned how you can write in PowerPoint slides in the 2007 edition, which is useful for note taking within presenations.

• Quotepad - A great tool to take / aggregate  notes from the web or your computer (from anywhere!).

• Vocab Grabber - A great visual thesaurus to get children to experiment with worlds and to improve their language

• Ether Pad - Online collaborative documents – not normally blocked by school firewalls.

• Switheroozoo - A great little website for learning about animals and even creating some of your own – what do you think of my ElicheetaZeb?

• Fighting Maleria - A good website for learning about Malaria and a good example of how very serious citizenship issues can be talked through the medium of computer games.

• Wordle - An old classic but Tim uses it in an interesting way to analyze note taking – watch the video to see how.

The video is well worth 30mins of your time.

Creating Classroom Comics

Regular readers of this website will no that I have a real passion for the use of comics and graphic novels in the classroom. My favorite free on-line comic creation tools at the moment are Comic Brush and Pixton.

Comic Brush (www.comicbrush.com) is a bit like a free version of Comic Life and it allows you to make on-line comics for the iPhone / iPod, comic strips and full length comics. It is easy to use and you can either insert your own pictures into the comic strip or download an art pack (small charge) or do a bit of both. The art packs are great as they allow you to introduce licensed characters / artwork such Judge Dread or manga into your comics.

Here is an example of a comic brush comic that I made quickly about the recent Handheld Learning 2009 Conference. All the pictures I have used in the comic were taken by James Clay.

(click on the image to make it bigger)

Pixton (www.pixton.com) is equally as good but serves a different purpose. With Pixton you can really develop the fine detail of a character right down to facial expression and gestures. Pixton is free to use but you can also pay for an education license that gives the teacher more control over student accounts.

Here is a quick example of a pixton comic that I used recently to set some tasks at a recent Learning and Teaching Scotland whole staff event.

The problem is despite these tools being free they may be blocked by some local education authorities and they rely on a reasonable bandwidth in order for them to work properly.

As a result I like to remind teachers that you can actually produce fairly good comics in PowerPoint. I recently produced an Innovative Teacher InnoVid on the subject which some people may find interesting (version embeded below).

You can find out more information about InnoVids here.

And if thats not enough comic stuff for you you could also have a look at these 100 tips, tools and resources for teachers.

WallE – Using robots as a contextual hub for learning in schools

My friend and colleague Lynne Lewis who is Principal Teacher at Athelstaneford Primary School in East Lothian has been doing a unit of work on robots with her class. Due to the small rural nature of the school Lynn has a composite class of 6, 7 and 8 year old children.

For the first part of the term Lynn has structured her curriculum around robots in particular WallE and used this as a contextual hub for learning. It looks like her class have been learning loads and having great fun.

Lynne sent me this Animoto Video of the class in action which also shows some of the learning activities that the class have been taking part in. I was going to show it at Teachmeet SLF09 but Lynn’s name didn’t get picked from the fruit machine. Luckily she (and her class) have agreed for me to post it up here – I think its excellent!

cartoonster.com – a great website to introduce animation to children

Cartoonster is a great little website that I found out about recently on how to create simple animations.

Its fun to use and talks about creating storyboards, perspective, flip book animation and lots more. I think it would be a great classroom resource for anyone wishing to introduce animation to a class of children.

Would love to know if anyone has used this with a class?

BrainPOP UK tackles Swine Flu

My friends over at BrainPOP UK have been quick off the mark to create this great little education video about Swine Flu, what it is and how you can prevent infection. It also tackles terms such as ‘pandemic,’ and ‘vaccine’.

It’s a great little video to help children understand exactly what Swine Flu is. You can view the video over on the BrainPOP UK Site and also via their YOU Tube Channel.

Nice work  Tim and Moby!

BETT 2009 – Pixton (create great comics in no time at all)

One of the coolest products that I saw at BETT 2009 was Pixton – I instantly thought that it was a great little fun resource that I could start using in my classroom straight away.

Pixton is a social media website where you create comics − without having to draw. People of all ages can share, remix, and publish their ideas, opinions, and stories to a worldwide audience. To find out more about Pixton view the video below:

 

Its key features are:

Easy to use comic creator: build a comic from scratch or choose from a library of templates.

Fully customizable characters: any age, ethnic background, or gender by choosing hair and skin colour, height and girth, and much more.

Articulate characters: bring them to life by rotating individual body parts, or selecting from preset poses and facial expressions. Simply click and drag!

Share with the world: publish, email and embed comics in your blog. Comics and comments are automatically translated to and from other languages.

Remix and collaborate: edit a copy of any comic to add your own twist. Because remixes are listed below the original comic, you can follow its evolution!

Community: create a Pixton avatar, win fans and make friends! Pinpoint them on your own Google map, send messages, and share comics.

There are two versions of Pixton. A free version where you have to set up individual accounts or a paid version where the teacher can monitor the classes comics. The latter is quite expensive –but I don’t see why you couldn’t just use the free one with your classes or the paid version if you value the added security.

I’m looking forward to trying out this resource with a class sometime over the next couple of weeks.

BETT 2009 – BrainPop UK

I thought I might meet finally get to meet Tim and Moby at BETT 2009 – but they were (apparently) away filming some more great little educational animated videos.

However, I did get to meet the UK BrainPop Team. Who can only be described as an enthusiastic bunch that seem completely committed to making BrainPop as successful in the UK as its American sister (or brother?) site.

I think it will be really interesting to see how BrainPop UK develops over the coming months. One thing is for sure, the team seem very committed to building a sense of fun and community around what I think is a very powerful learning resource for children.

You can follow BrainPop on Twitter and YouTube (although there is not a lot on their channel yet!). They even have their own moo stickers – I was lucky enough to be given a set at BETT. Also a big thanks to BrainPOP for helping sponsor Teachmeet BETT 2009.

BETT 2009 – Boardworks

I’ve authored a couple of things for Boardworks in the past and it was great to get a preview of the latest Geography material at BETT 2009. I was quite excited about this particular product as it’s a geography tool kit / enquiry skills resource and will be really useful in Scottish Schools as well as for the KS3/KS4 Curriculum that we designed it for.

The really innovative bit about the product is the interactive mysteries – I can see these being really engaging for young people. I wrote and storyboarded for the one on the Mountain Mystery - where you have to work out, 'Why was the body found on Mt. Kenya’. Students have to sort through various bits of information to find out why the body was found there. Different scenarios and red herrings include, ‘he was carried there by a Tsunami’, ‘he fell into a glacier and the glacier has melted,’ ‘he was killed by a mountain lion,’ and ‘he was killed by volcanic gas’.

I can’t wait to try this out with a class next week – hopefully I’ll get some geography cover?

I also worked on the coasts, GIS and tourism section of the resource. I even managed to get a bit in about the Dorset coast (where I grew up) and East Lothian’s Scottish Sea Bird Centre.

I originally stated doing some bits and pieces for Boardworks as they were able to create resources that I didn’t have the skills or time to create myself. It’s really nice to see some of my ideas develop into an engaging product.

Here are some screenshots from the new resource:

Geographical Mystery

Coastal Fieldwork

GIS and ICT in Geography

Tourism Fieldwork

It was also really great to catch up with Stephen and Alice who worked with me on the project. The next task will be to start on the A-Level Geography Project.