Author: bfarand1

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SparkleFish

sparklefish-logo

“The world we have created is a product of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”
–Albert Einstein

How will SparkleFish benefit your students?

Using this creative application will give your students the opportunity to construct their own understandings of word formations and sentence structures.

SparkleFish encourages students to explore and discover the different kinds of vocabulary such as adjectives, nouns, verbs and exclamations that may be found within a piece of writing.

This application guides students in creating vocabulary that can be rearranged in their own order to, enhancing key understandings of literacy concepts.

Students are able to practice using their voice projections and pronunciation, an opportunity to improve and reflect on their own skills throughout the experience.

How would Scratch work in your classroom?

SparkleFish is an application which provides audio/visual instructions for students to record their voice. Each instruction asks students to record themselves speaking particular vocabulary e.g. animal, noun, body part etc. Using the student driven words, the application processes all words to make a story.

Students are able to use the “buzz” words and story lines to construct their own creative writing.

Students are encouraged to be imaginative when adding different types of words to their stories.

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How would you integrate Scratch within the curriculum?

Below is an example of SparkleFish used in a year 2 digital technologies lesson.

Subject: Digital Technologies

Year Level: 2

Strand: Digital Technologies –Processes and Production Skills

Sub Strand: Create events and characters using different media that develop key events and characters from literary texts (ACELT1593)

Cross Curriculum Priorities and General Capabilities:

  • Literacy
  • Critical and Creative Thinking
  • Information and Communication Technology (ICT) capability

Links To Other Learning Areas: English

Activity: SparkleFish can be used to extend students’ skills within a literacy activity. During a creative writing lesson, the application allows students to think of new and creative ways to start a story. Prompting various forms of vocabulary, SparkleFish teaches students the correct format and creative ways to use adjectives, nouns, verbs etc. throughout a story. Students are able to construct their own unique piece of writing with the correct vocabulary and format.

How do you use SparkleFish?

Where do i find SparkleFish?

http://sparklefishapp.com

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Scratch

ScratchBlogLogo

“The real power of interactive technologies is that they let us learn in ways that aren’t otherwise possible or practical.” – David Lassner

How will Scratch benefit your students?

Within the classroom today, coding is becoming an influential skill that gives students an appreciation of what can be built with technology.

Scratch is designed to assist your students in learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively. These skills are essential for life in the 21st century, a digital world.

As educators, we need to empower students to be able to make personal connections to computing, by drawing upon creativity, imagination and interests. This is what Scratch aims to achieve.

Providing your students with the understanding of how technologies work brings their ideas to life in big, bright and creative ways.

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How would Scratch work in your classroom?

First of all, Scratch is actually free! Which means your students could be using this  program within minutes.

Scratch is a visual programming language produced to help simplify the processes of creating and programming animations, games, music, interactive stories and much more.

Worried about your year level or individual student abilities? No need to worry! Scratch offers activities for all year levels and abilities across all learning areas.

How would you integrate Scratch within the curriculum? 

Below is an example of Scratch used in a year 3-4 digital technologies lesson.

Subject: Digital Technologies

Year Level: 3-4

Strand: Digital Technologies – Knowledge and Understanding

Sub Strand: Explore and use a range of digital systems with peripheral devices for different purposes, and transmit different types of data (ACTDIK007)

Cross Curriculum Priorities and General Capabilities: 

  • Literacy
  • Numeracy
  • Critical and creative thinking
  • Information and Communication Technology (ICT) capability

Links To Other Learning Areas: English

Activity: Scratch can be used to extend students’ skills within a literacy activity. A fun way to incorporate computing programming into literacy is by using Scratches animation features such as speech bubbles, captions and sound effects to help tell a student written story. This idea is for students to recreate a scene(s) from a story with a background, characters from the story, animation and text. As students develop their skills they can create more complex codes.

How do you use Scratch?

Where do i find Scratch?

https://scratch.mit.edu