My Animal Tree using textease

Exploring child-friendly search engines

From previous experience, the school I last worked at had a tight policy on internet restictions. Access to Google images and you tube was banned by both staff and children. Staff could only use it (for teaching resources etc) if they asked permission for the head to unblock the safety. However, this required extensive cooperation with all other staff as they had to know when it was unblocked incase another class accessed it. It makes me question the reasons that lie behind child safetly and internet restritions ... exactly what are we trying to protect our children from? If we safeguard them from certain things, images or 'chat rooms' for example (which I am not condoning but just using as an example) aren't we making a bigger deal out of things than really are, and so urging them to want to experiment anyway? Is it not better that they do this under the supervision of a professional adult rather than alone under rebellion? Is it not more about saving our skin as the 'responsible adults' due to all the policies and laws etc rather than for the benefit of the children? I'm not sure myself, but just thought I'd air another point of view.

I tried searching on yahooligans.com and ask jeeves for kids for images of animals. Ask jeeves for kids was pretty good and came up with some really useful images of animals. I feel it imortant that children have access to search angines such as these in school. Many, particularly in underprivilleged backgrounds have not experienced wildlife and certain animals in real life. Therefore access to information about them in school is imperative. Unfortunately, yahooligans website did not offer access to the images which was a shame. I think that possibly this website may have also put a restriction on it. To what extent are we cotton-wooling our kids to save our own necks and depriving them from the real world out there, both good and bad? How is this benefitting them as our future generation? More to the point... we need to accept that nothing, internet, toy, whatever, is ever going to be a million percent 'child friendly'... the sooner we realise this and act on it the better!

The podcast task not only uses a variety of learning styles within its processes, but it can also be used as a teaching aid for children with EAL for example. Some children will be better audible learners and so recording your voice and putting it together with some text could enhance their understanding of the topic.
The problem with just using video is that all your senses are fed and so it probably wouldn't stimulate every child's creative brain.

Making the video made me realise the direct links to cross curriculum areas. Doing an activity like this really enhances opportunities for children's presentation of their work through video. This also allows for a wider range of learners to acess the task. This activity is motivational and engaging, yet easy for children to accomplish.

Watching the video of Trevor and Harriet

This was an excellent way of presenting a moral story (you can get what you want if you really believe) in a way that is extremely appealing to children becasue it is animated, yet true to life. There was a lot of detail in this video, it makes me wonder how long it took to make! The sound effects were excellent! This is something I only though of having commented on the reading before. For example, I initially only thought of accomodating children's learning through the use of the video camera. However, I have now realised that this can also be done in terms of allocating roles to children to do with the audio parts e.g. sound effects, which are just as important in making a movie thematic, intereresting and enjoyable.

Roles of Multiple Intelligence in the Creation of Multimedia Projects

There are eight inteliigences identified in this reading:
Linguistic, Logical-Mathematical, Spatial, Body-Kinaesthetic, Musical, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal,
Naturalist.

Thus, as a teacher, it is important to be aware of these principles; to ensure that children are identified in terms of how they best learn and how they will best be stimulated during the use and incoorporation of ICT lessons.

For the video composition task, I feel that this task would be suited especially to the body kinsasthetic, musical, linguistic, interpersonal and intrapersonal types of learners. Although, having said this, I feel that the video task could be suited/ taylored to all types of learner identified in this reading: the teacher can adapt the task, the planning and the learning objectives to suit the whole range. For example for naturalist learners, the video could be adapted so that scene is set outdoors, rather than indoors etc.

IWB example