Educating the Dragon

There are just few pictures of the attendees of my stopmotion workshop. It’s amazing what can be created with simply a webcam, windows movie maker/ imovie and bit of imagination.

What I love about this workshop is that after the first 30 minutes of my introductions the remainder of the workshop is completely dependent on the delegates and the direction they wish to go as they spend either a long or short time trying out the different sorts of animation.

This particular workshop everyone focused on cutout rather than pen and ink.

I know by some peoples standards I’ve not been around education all that long and I’ve certainly been around the edublogosphere a fraction of that time. But I have just reached my 365th post, which must count to something. Regardless I have, as yet failed to find an answer to my question: “What is ‘digital literacy’?
However I did com across a slideshare by Dr Tabetha Newman who quoted Allan Martin and suggested it as being one of the most broad, flexible but still tangible definitions out there.
“The awareness, attitude and ability of individuals to appropriately use digital tools and facilities to identify, access, manage, integrate, evaluate, analyse and synthesise digital resources, construct new knowledge, create media expressions, and communicate with others, in the context of specific life situations, in order to enable constructive social action; and to reflect upon this process”
Hardly a bumper sticker so question being:
Can you come up with a better definition? In less than 55 words?

John Key came to Owhata Primary (Rotorua) on Thursday 12 March 2009. He spent some time in classrooms seeing what the children are doing with Interactive Whiteboards.

In the brief time he was in classes, he learnt how to draw, write, freeform capture, record himself and insert a sound file into an interwrite document. This shows how easy the programme is to use and how many skills our 6-8 year olds have acquired in guiding him through these processes. He was impressed with the level of technology these children were using.
A fantastic experience for our children and staff.

- Robyn, Owhata Primary School

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.