Educating the Dragon

My writing group this morning had a great time exploring the features of the Scholastic Story starter Dragonsinger showed me yesterday . Below are the few stories:

Once in a millon years a mystic blueberry is born. The nerdest was born today. He went flying throw the air, he landed on some ice. He skidded down the hall, he landed in a time warp that led to the medieval ages. He pooped his pants , when a knight in evil dragon armour almost trampled him. It was a huge battle , and knights in evil dragon armour were winning. They had won the battle. A lady started making fire with her bare hands. 5 years later, the mystic blueberry became the king of evil.

Two days ago a ghost plane flew through the Napier movies only two people saw it. The government had to shut the moveis down. Two days later they had to investigate how it happened. It would take them about ten more waeks to find out how it happened.

“The movies will be closed for weeks. we have sent five ghost hunter and there was nothing there” said a man from Napier University, “and we don’t know if it will open again.

Thanks Jo for the heads up with this cool story writer thing. I was wondering what my group was going to do tomorrow as I have had to cancel the trip. But this just answers it perfectly. I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow.

We were talking about nouns with my senior writing group today; common nouns, proper nouns and pronouns – what they are and when would we use them.

So just for the last 10 minutes I thought I’d set them a challenge for proper nouns – I wrote up the following categories:

people

city

month

important day

country

region

Then one of them called out, "Hey, Mr Evans we could do civilisations." Never one to turn down self direction and general enthusiasm, I wrote it up.

When the group reached "civilisations" they blew me way, here is the list they came out with, off the tops of their collective heads: Ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, Norse ("Rub out Viking Mr Evans, they’re the same thing"), Aztecs, Chinese, Mongols, Spartans, Persians and Atlantians.

That is quite a collection for a "special needs’ writing group so I asked how did they know so many.

One said " I used to be into the Egyptians, went to the library all the time. Go loads of books and videos and stuff."

Another answered "Some of those are in Age of Empires too."

The conversation followed:

" Hey, can we do a civilisations thing in this group?" they ask.

"Sure, why not." I say.

"Yeah" says one. "We could write a book about different characters and creatures and legends and cities and stuff, eh? Mr Evans."

There is the motivation right there. I’m looking forward to gettting their computers networked next week, then I talk about wikipedia and google searchesand all that sort of stuff. I love it when I stumble cross a button like that… Switching the kids on.

Over the last week my boy has been practising with the mousepad on my computer. Here are a few links to helpful sites than enable your average pre-schooler to engage with the Web.

Fisher Price

Starfall

Boowa & Kwala

Jigzone

Lego

Sesame Street (beta)

The Creatives

Thanks, Rosie.

Today was the day for two training sessions.

Firstly, I ran ‘Digital Storytelling" workshop, sharing the online platforms of Voicethread, Teachertube, and Slideshare.

I always enjoy running these session because I find teachers bring just as much to a session as I do. We began a voicethread… My first really proper one and it is oh so basic but I am hoping that others whole attended the session will be adding there thoughts about it. The cough at the beginning of my talk is not me but an attendee who shall remain nameless.

Cliotech was good enough to allow me to share some of the input from her slideshare .

Second up was Stop motion animation. Some folk from this morning stayed into the afternoon. We played around with webcams for a while and discussed the usefulness of animation creation to support not only the literacy programme but also it solidfy learning in other areas, for example creating an animation to illustrate life-cycles in science. We even had one uploaded to www.teachertube.com by the end of the session. It’s entitled "Mr Mouse" Enjoy!

ps. It was also great to know about a couple of sound wikispaces today. One of the attendees has been struggling with establishing her class wiki on wikispaces. I would have loved to sit down with her and assist in creating her class wiki, but that would be another 3 hour session so I pointed her in the direction on Wonderfulworldof.wikispaces.com and encouraged her to look through the material there before she gave up. Often I find its better to have the pointers than to be able to ‘Fix it’ then and there. Thanks Chrissy

pps. Thanks Derek for sharing this . What a powerful illustration of Storytelling in the 21st Century