Teaching with Technology

Today I had one of the best lessons ever! To be honest it had nothing to do with the curriculum, but everything to do with fun, creativity and positivity in school. Like most of what I think are the best learning exeriences it was organic and basically unplanned.

After a particularly arduous rehearsal for the Christmas production I felt that the children needed a bit of a lift. I decided to let them loose on Pivot Stick Animator which I’ve been looking at for a while.

I decided to take a bit of a risk and announced that there eadbgoing to be a competition to see who could make their man do the best breakdance. I played the children a track from my iPhone and them let them loose. No instructions of anything.

I was amazed by the results that you can see bellow.

The children were completely engaged, belong each other, laughing and learning! It really was one of those moments that you’ll remember.

Today I stumbled across this tool called Stripgenerator whilst looking through my Google reader.   There seem to be a lot of flash based comic book creators out there at the moment and I’ve already blogged about Comiqs.   I decided that I’d follow the same sort of format and allow the children a complete carte blanche to see what they came up with.

I was really pleased with the results, within minutes the children had started to come up with all sorts of wild and wacky stories that were really creative.   I thought that this could be a really useful stimulus for the start of a creative writing lesson.   The children would have three pannels that effectively have the beginning middle and end of a story.