Last week I was fortunate to attend an inservice course “ICT and Literacy”, with reference to A Curriculum for Excellence.
The day had various components, including how and what ICT materials was used in our classes. There were about a dozen teachers who were teaching at different different stages in primary schools. Two items especially came to my attention.
1. . Comic Life has been mention on Argyll and Bute Glow Mentor blogs before. This super application allows photos to be turned into comic strips. Children will love this! And, we are very fortunate in Argyll and Bute, that the authority has purchased site licenses for us. (A note here for Argyll and Bute staff: there is a free upgrade at Comic Life’s website.) Comic Life it is multi dividending! Importing and managing photos, creating a story line and introducing speech into work.
The curricular guidelines for A Curriculum for Excellence has emphasis on the implications and appropriate use of technologies and digital texts. Comic Life fits well in here.
2. StarWriter Published by Longman. This is a writing programme for children in Primary 4-7. It helps to deliver self assessment, is easy to use, and is very popular. The children like it. The reason I mention it here is that quite a few teachers on the course, and we were from different schools, remarked how good it was as a writing package. It uses multimedia software.
I am not getting paid by either of these publishers! Just ‘thought you would like to hear the verdicts of teachers. I will certainly be exploring these products more.
4 responses so far ↓
1
Marlyn Moffat
// Mar 13, 2007 at 12:49 am
My P3’s used comiclife a lot last year, quite independently and really enjoyed it. They got really concerned that their spelling should be right and it had an impact on co-operative learning, especially when we were going to publish on the blog. Glad you got something from your day, too.
2
Gordon McKinlay
// Mar 13, 2007 at 10:14 pm
I agree, Comic Life is a brilliant piece of software. It is incredibly easy to use and produced fantastic results very quickly.
3
Wendy Robinson
// Jan 21, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Comic Life is fantastic. We have used it in many different ways in P7. Excellent resource for creating story lines.
4
Narayan Kundu
// Jul 30, 2008 at 2:09 am
I also attended a CPD regional event for ICT/Comic Life and found the whole software fascinating, particularly when used with iMac which Edinburgh City council use the majority of in a majority of schools. However as with most things the jury report that the software is a bit too expensive for the council to afford. Three cheers for A&B if they are adopting this system, but effective use with additional software such as Garage Band shows a extra dimension and capability of owning and using Apple Mac systems compared to PC.
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