Thursday, July 14, 2011

PYP Exhibition

I have finally finished my PYP Exhibition Journal! I have embedded it here along with the small booklet that I produced for visitors at the exhibition and the short movie trailer that I created for my class blog. The original journal was created in pages and has links and videos embedded in the file. To see a copy of this with the links activated, go to my shared documents in iWork where it has been uploaded.


Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Holidays - time to explore

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
~ Arthur Koestler

I love being on holiday! I enjoy the down time with my family and travelling to new places, but I think what I love most of all is simply having more time. Time to explore, to learn, to experiment. As a teacher I am constantly being introduced to new ideas, yet I have little time to play with these ideas and figure out how I might be able to use them with my students.

My first experiment of the holiday was with Storify. This online platform allows you to easily pull together items from social media (such as articles, images, video, blog posts and tweets) to tell a story. Below is my first attempt ~ next step... How will I use this with my students?



My second exploration is with the use of QR-codes. I was first introduced to this 2 dimensional bar code at the ADE Institute in April. While I thought this was an interesting way to present information, I really hadn't had much time to look at these images or consider how to use them. I'm still not really sure, but I have had fun generating some QR-codes and then using my phone to scan the ones I have made or found. The code below was generated with Kaywa, an online site that will generate the QR-code and you can download the reader at this site as well. There are many free apps that will do this as well - they turn the camera on your phone into a scanner that can read the image. I am using i-nigma and it seems to work very well.

                                           qrcode

And why is it important to take time to explore? I think the following video sums it up well.