Still Exploring, but at a Snail's Pace (in my case at least)

This post is from our ABC Online Gaming Club.

I thought I would share it and ask that anyone using GMod with their students who would like to share, please do.

From the Blog:
We haven't been able to meet up in past weeks, due to end of the school year meetings, steam updates and downtimes as well as other activities. That said the kids are working in Garry's Mod at their own pace and some have even produced some machinima for it, which we are hoping to post here. The kids will be writing one post prior to the end of the school year on their experiences so far.

At this point, the parental letter explaining the family sharing settings has been shared with parents through GDocs and we are set to have our last club meeting this coming Thursday.

The club will be back next school year and we hope to really make progress with our long awaited GMod accounts. We are definitely newbies when it comes to this application but willing and excited to learn.  If there is anyone out there that is using GMod with their students, we would really love to hear from you.

ABC DVA 2014

The ABC DVA was a great success again this year. The quality of student videos showed a marked improvement both in work done at school and independent videos. 

This year we had an impressive turnout for the event. In fact this year's DVA was the best attended of all of our Digital Video Award evenings. The Performing Arts Centre was bustling with more than 200 people in attendance.

All of our nominee videos on our ABCICT site if you would like to peruse them. They will give you a good idea of the type of work students are doing across the Primary and Secondary schools.  If you are not a member of staff or student, you won't be able to see the voting form, but you will be able to scroll down to the embedded playlists, which can be found directly below the form.

Do also take a moment to check out the pictures from the event in our Flickr album.
We should have video footage from the event, including interviews shortly, so do check back in about a week's time.

IPad Magic Rules!

Our ICT lessons are famous for their flurry of activity and sometimes louder than a hum, noise levels. That is all good, we've no complaints there. These are learning noises and when we need quiet or silence we get it.

Today we introduced our 6s to GarageBand on the iPads, handed them one each, plugged them in with their headsets and let them loose. What happened next? My teaching partner and I suddenly looked at each other, with shocked expressions on our faces and whispered (because you could hear a whisper) " It is so quiet,"

Have a listen.

iPads bring out the magic and creativity in kids and with the right activities and apps, and engage them to the point that they self direct, explore, peer tutor and require very little direct instruction. It is all a matter of choosing the right apps for activities, establishing routines and expectations, and offering up interesting, clear instructions and exemplars, which don't take up too much of the lesson time.


We are looking forward to sharing our student rap songs in our A Better World Wiki. This is the first time using iPads for the audio for the project and our expectations are high. 

It is usually the mark of a great lesson, when the kids don't want to leave. such was the dilemma today!

Scratch Week is Here!

Scratch Week is finally here! This is the week that all that programming, pays off for our grade 8s! Why you may ask?

A while back I posted about the work in Scratch the 8s were doing, programming learning games for the Prepa and 1st Grade students. (You can read that original post here.) They finished the project some time back, and have since been debugging their work on and off.

This week the younger students get to come to the LRC along with their teachers to try out the learning games that were developed especially for them. We have been looking forward to this for a long time and expect it to be a wonderful experience for our student developers and student end users.

Here is the link to the studio of projects in case you are interested in trying some of them out.


Do check back for links to our Scratch Week pictures. I will post them later on in the week.