3F's Math's videos

This term, 3F have been working on creating video demonstrations using the iPod Touches. The aim of the videos was to help children to better understand an aspect of Maths. The children were encouraged to be creative and to keep their videos interesting. Next term we will revisit these videos to reflect on what the children like and what they might change next time they use the iPod Touches to create a video.

Here are our videos. ( also see our other video in the 3F video post below). We hope you enjoy them and appreciate the hard work the children have put into this project.

Months of the Year by year 3F

Creative Use of Apps in 3W

Wow!!! We have had an amazing time using some creative apps in our Literacy groups.

We began with Make a Martian and Comic Touch. All of us were surprised by how many different martians we could choose to create. This encouraged our creativity and allowed us to make some fun choices. We enjoyed the fact that our martian didn't have to look like anything that really exists. After we finished creating our martians we then used the Comic Touch app to add speech to our martian. The results were very funny. We all enjoyed using both these apps in our literacy rotations.

We were lucky enough to begin a unit on Poetry this term. We looked at Acrostic Poems, Limericks, Shape Poems, Cinquains and we have just started learning about Diamantes. We're now ready to take on the challenge of the Poetry Festival in Term 3.

We used two different apps to create poetry. First of all we used Puppet Pals to create a funny limerick. The fun part of using this app is that we were able to voice record our limerick onto the app and play it back. This was great because we could use the expression in our voice to enhance the limerick. We found we had to speak quite loudly into the iPod touch to make a clear recording. We are lucky enough to have discovered that we can hook our iPod touch to our speakers, so everyone can listen to our wonderful limericks.

TypeDrawing was the most recent app we have used. This was a perfect choice for the creation of our shape poems. In class, we created a variety of different shape poems, so we were pretty confident putting one together using TypeDrawing. First of all we had to decide on a topic for our shape poem. Once we had perfected it we were ready to use TypeDrawing. This app was really popular with all of us. We could type in the text, using a font of our choice and a font colour of our choice. Magically, our finger did the rest! All we had to do is draw the shape of what we had chosen as our topic and it magically appeared on the iPod screen in front of us. The words we had typed in for our poem created the outline of our drawing. This was lots of fun!!!

Amazing Work

This week year 3F have been busy making Math's videos to teach the other grades about different Math's concepts. Some of topics we are making our videos about are mapping, shapes, counting, groups of, months, adding and takeaway and times tables.

We have learnt that to make the videos exciting you have to make it look good and put some funny or interesting things in the videos. To make a good video you have to persuade the person watching it to keep watching it. It is also important to make sure our message is clear and easy to understand, otherwise we will just confuse people.

We discovered that sometimes we had to make more than one video to get it to look right. We have learnt that it is often a good idea to take photos from a bird's eye view, which means taking the photo when you are looking down on what you are taking the photo of. To make a video, we have learnt that it is important to make sure the image is in focus and clear, and to try not to move the iPod too much otherwise the video looks all shaky. You have to also make sure you are using the ipod at the right angle to take photos or video.

One of the reasons we are making our own math's videos is to give the children in other classes a way to learn about Maths other than just looking at the apps.

We have used a number of different creative apps to make our videos, including glow draw lite, sonic pics, camera, video and comic touch.

When we are finished, we will share our work with the other classes.