Week 4 - The importance of graphs in society and the classroom

The first thing that Greg said to me today that really made sense is that all subjects can be explored through ICT. We happened to look at Maths using ICT for the first part of the lesson. The first activity that we tried was counting M&M colours. We had to open a packet of M&Ms and sort the colours into groups. We then turned this into a graph representation using Microsoft Excel. I think this is the first time that I have felt comfortable in this class because Excel is a program that I actually feel good about using and feel that I have a good understanding of! Below is my example of the graph I made in Excel, representing the number of each colour of M&Ms in the packet.

I think that this activity is good because it is very versitle and could be adapted to other topics such as childrens hair colour, eye colour or perhaps car colour in the car park. I think the main point that Greg was trying to get across in the first part of the lesson is for us to understand the role of graphs in both the classroom and society.  Graphs are great for children to use. They have the opportunity of being creative and can add fun pictures and interesting backgrounds at the end to make their graph unique.

Above we used Inspiration to re-tell a story from the abc website. The website can be found at http://www.abc.net.au/dustechoes/dustEchoesFlash.htm The first thing I had to do was select an aboroginal story to watch. The stories had no words but instead music and traditional aboroginal language. Our task was to re-tell the story in our own words using inspiration. We cut and paste still shots from the animation story and then added text to create our story.  I enjoyed this activity and think it is a great idea for older children in the classroom. I can see myself using this in my own classroom as a comprehension activity. I would probably not use the activity in the same context as we did, but I would consider using it for other topics.  I think it would be a great idea to have children come up with their own story, or perhaps re-tell one of their own favourite stories. Activities like this one help make classrooms stand out, be interactive, creative and alive. In other words a fun place to be!!