28 August

Why do we have ICT in our Primary School?

2007-08-26T21:53:00.000+02:00

I've put the text of the ICT page from the PYP section of the ecolint.ch web site, (in case you've lost your password, and can't see the original...)

Information and Communication Technologies

The British National Curriculum outlines the aims and purposes of teaching ICT in the primary years as offering opportunities for children to:

develop IT capability, including their knowledge and understanding of the importance of information and of how to select and prepare it;
develop their skills in using hardware and software to manipulate information in their processes of problem solving, recording and expressive work;
develop their ability to apply their IT capability and ICT to support their use of language and communication, and their learning in other areas;
explore their attitudes towards ICT, its value for themselves, others and society, and their awareness of its advantages and limitations.

Similarly, after a long process of consultation with ICT educators around the world, new Standards were unveiled this summer at the NECC, the National Educational Computing Conference in Atlanta (USA). Ten years after the original NETS were written, the new standards focus on

creativity and innovation;
communication and collaboration;
research and information fluency;
critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making;
digital citizenship;
technology operations and concepts

While we do not follow any specific national or state program of study in ICT at Campus des Nations, we do support and encourage the philosophies and standards described above. We want to teach our students the skills, attitudes and dispositions necessary for fluent, principled and creative use of the information and communication technologies they have at their disposal now, and we want to develop in their ability to grow along with ICT in their future.

Information about the the British National Curriculum is available online.

A pdf file of the new standards is available at the ISTE web site.

Changing languages in MS Word on a Mac

2007-08-24T10:35:00.000+02:00

The Dock in Mac OS

2007-08-24T10:30:00.000+02:00

How to "right-click" with a Mac mouse

2007-08-24T10:25:00.000+02:00

Finding a misplaced file on a Mac

2007-08-24T10:22:00.000+02:00

Renaming Files on a Mac

2007-08-24T10:18:00.000+02:00

Deleting files on a Mac

2007-08-24T10:13:00.000+02:00

Changing Finder views on a Mac

2007-08-24T09:48:00.000+02:00

Create a .pdf file on a Mac

2007-08-24T09:45:00.000+02:00

iBook support

2007-08-24T09:24:00.000+02:00

Apple Manuals can be downloaded here in several languages for our models of iBooks.

The serious side of a Mac Mini

2007-08-24T09:19:00.000+02:00

Using Comic Life (with iPhoto)

2007-08-24T08:48:00.000+02:00

Using FlickrStorm

2007-08-24T08:08:00.000+02:00

Using del.icio.us

2007-08-24T07:58:00.000+02:00

As with most of the new generation of web tools (web 2.0), del.icio.us' success for you as a tool depends on tagging - adding multiple descriptive words to an item. Here is selection of quotes from a discussion of tagging books, on Librarything.com:

"One of the things I find most fascinating about tagging is what it reveals about the cognitive processes of the taggers. What makes one person tag Walden with "simplicity" and another person with "hermits"? It's not a novel observation that we all experience books (for example) personally or subjectively. Tagging is a very simple way to turn that individual experience into universal information. (johnascott)"

"I'm always amazed at the different ways of viewing something when I see how differently others tagged something to which I have already assigned the most 'correct' or 'appropriate' tags. (bobngail)"

"I think the main point to remember is that tagging is NOT JUST an unstructured form of subject headings; it is a completely different way of viewing the world. Taxonomies and standardised subject heading vocab divide knowledge hierarchically according to set rules. Folksonomies allow knowledge to emerge through collaborative involvement. Tagging allows people to look at books in new ways, to share that knowledge, and to create tag clouds so that no one tag gets missed. (mrsradcliffe)"

"Tagging is getting awfully close, it seems, to the way our brains naturally work anyway - it "associates" and "retrieves" based on miscellaneous tags it has (subconsciously) attached to the idea or concept. (nicknich3)"

(You might be interested in seeing the LibraryThing page for Singapore's United World College PYP Library. Look at their tag cloud, and their tag mirror (which expands the cloud to include other people's related tags).

Using iPhoto to make a slide show

2007-08-22T20:54:00.000+02:00

Digital Storytelling

2007-08-22T18:02:00.000+02:00

What is it?

Digital Storytelling refers to telling a story with some digital media.
Maybe it's a video, but in school it is often a media production of photos, kid's drawings, family artifacts, original digital art, or a combination of any or all, with voice narrative and /or music added. Must of all, it tells a story: a personal story, a historical narrative, the story of a place, the story of a scientific process, the story of learning, etc.

On the web, a great deal of the "digital storytelling" results refer to an adult, "my life story" living-history legacy type of project. If you add the keyword "education" into the search, you will find more of what we are interested in.

If you Google "digital Storytelling" you will get 2,520,000 results. Start with these there to save a little time:

Begin at Digital Story Telling, Adobe Kids Club's Digital Storytelling page.
Listen to the podcast of Helen Barrett's presentation at NECC exploring the many uses of digital stories in electronic portfolios at this Apple Learning Interchange page. You can also see the PowerPoint slides for the presentation (very small). Dr. Barrett's own web site has (more or less) the text and ideas she expressed in her talk, and all the videos are linked there (or you can find them all together at this page).

One 4th and 5th grade teacher's story of his class project: Digital Storytelling Finds Its Place in the Classroom

The Apple website has some very polished examples of combining Language Arts work with media here, (Chasing Metaphores) and here. (A New Life, a New Home)

You can browse through the sites Craig Roland has gathered on his del.icio.us Digital Storytelling pages.

On VoiceThread.com, you can look at some samples (and create some of your own, of course!) Hello, my name is Truman was created by a teacher for students to read (no audio); The three little pigs demonstrates how to use multiple "profiles" to tell a story; The ABC Collaborative Movie Project is an example of one teacher's experimenting with VoiceThread.

Voice Thread

2007-08-21T23:00:00.000+02:00

Check out this web tool:
This is Voicethread's description of itself,
and this is a teacher experimenting with it.
and here for a tutorial.
See what you think.

a Google Account

2007-08-21T22:45:00.000+02:00

Go to this page to see what you have access to with a Google Account.

The Finder

2007-08-21T22:01:00.001+02:00

Go to "The Finder" in the Mac 101 Tour

The Mac Desktop

2007-08-21T21:58:00.000+02:00

Go to the Mac 101 Tour