Mini Maker STEAM Fest Challenges

 Prior to the Christmas Holidays, we launched our Mini Maker STEAM Fest Challenges. This activity marks the first step on the path to STEAM Fest 2022, which will take place later in the school year.

In the end, several students submitted their work for this activity.  We received quite a variety of projects, many of which were developed based on ideas taken from the Science Buddies website, while others were innovations the students designed and developed. themselves. 

At the ABC we very much value student choice,  agency and endeavour so it was fitting that we recognise and highlight the work of the students who not only engaged in various challenges over the past 2 months but also shared their final projects with us. 

On February 11th, each of these students were asked to visit the LRC, where they received a special, quite unexpected prize and a thank you from the organisers for taking part and for sharing their work. They can now choose whether to use their prizes to explore their favourite books or invest in further STEAM challenges at the Libreria Internacional.

Please do visit the STEAM Fest Mini Maker Challenge page for further details on this activity.

ABC DVA 2021 (Digital Video Awards)

DVA Special Update!

Please go to the LRC blog via this link to learn more about the event, the nominees, and the winning videos and producers and watch the live stream. You can also view the nominee winning producer/video list below.

The much anticipated ABC Secondary School DVA will take place this week. Do come out to the virtual event and support all of the wonderful student creativity that has taken place this school year. 

We will be using the ABC Bull Dogs Livestream for the event. Please use this link to access it or go to the DVA Website to access it from there. 

We look forward to seeing you all at DVA 2021. 

#ItsGreat2BABC!

 

ABES Online Conference 2020-Supporting Schools and Libraries During Closure

Each year we support the Salvador Librarians' Week by hosting a conference, which focuses on sharing ideas, techniques, and tools for libraries and teachers. This year, due to closures and quarantine in the country we moved the conference online.

It took place using GSuites Google Meet, Slides, and Google Chrome and was a great success. We plan to pick up where we left off in September with a followup in preparation for the new school year.

Media From the Event

• The Invitation
• The Virtual Library We Built with Certain Attendees
• Group Selfie
• The Recording

The Presentation 

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1dKL7rFEtzBmhB5KLqGKAvA4VpDdokJ51Lx9sN8A7h1o/edit

Global Education Conference 2019 and Library 2.0

Each year we participate in each of Library 2.0 and Global Ed Con.


This summer we had the opportunity to present the ways we used emerging technologies in the Library at the conference. This was a short session that we ran with some of the team in El Salvador and myself in Canada. It was the first time I had done this on a Cell phone and I was happily surprised that it went so well, considering Melissa, our librarian had to the change the slides for me as I spoke into my phone from thousands of miles away.

The second conference we presented at was the Global Education Conference which is taking place this week.

Our presentation focused on the ways in which we and our students work on projects, and activities through clubs and classes that focus on the UN SDGs.  In addition to this it demonstrated the ways in which we  attempt to broaden our student's global perspective, help them grow as global citizens who can make an impact, no matter how small, their world locally,  while thinking about the global situation.

The presentation recording will be available shortly and  as soon as I can I will post it here.  For now I have posted the link to the Google Slides presentation deck here.

Something very special about this presentation is that it was undertaken by a large team of both students and teachers, 14 of us in total. Despite a few last minute technical errors and a few seconds of dead air at times, while we shuffled speakers around, it ran fairly smoothly and everyone did an amazing job.

It is always heart warming to get positive feedback from attendees who have sat through a1 hour presentation. One such attendee, took a moment to speak with us at the end of the session. She had many a kind word for our presenters and thanked us all for sharing so many wonderful ideas and tools with everyone through the  presentation.

We look forward to running more of these sessions with each new year and sharing them with the world.

DVA 2019

This year's we are celebrating the ABC DVA's 10th anniversary!

How time has flown since our first practice run in September of 2009!

The DVA is and has always been about celebrating and sharing outstanding audio video work by the students for the students, as well as the entire ABC community (campus and extended). That said, over the past three years DVA has opened the doors to other schools in the local community. This year's DVA includes submissions from Acton Academy in both Primary and Secondary categories.

DVA has grown incrementally in both scope and length over the years to the point where the decision was made to run it as two events.
As a result, this year's DVA will run over 2 nights instead of the traditional one night event, with Secondary launching the events on February 12th and Primary closing DVA on February 13th.

Over the years, the ABC DVA has gained recognition internationally, as well as nationally through the regular sharing of this important work through community outreach and conferences such as Library and Classroom 2.0, Winter STEAM Conference, the ISTE Conference and local events.

One of the greatest impacts DVA has had over these past 10 years however is the growth of a culture of  creation through which all  students have opportunities to learn new skills, apply them across situations and subjects and share their work with audiences in the community.

Please go to our official DVA Website and our various DVA Flickr Galleries to learn more. 

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.

ABC Students Take a Trip to an Alien Planet

Written by Kenneth Horrocks and Jennifer Garcia



Science took an exciting turn at the ABC this week, as students from Grade 8 explored a virtual planet populated by alien plants and attempted to classify them according to Earthly classification standards. Each student used their own personalised avatar, kept a careful record of each plant identified in an online field notebook, and made a reasoned judgement about the probable taxonomy of each specimen. While exploring the virtual world, they had to content with mountains, carnivorous plants, floating islands and a giant monster pair of eyeballs which chased them around and stuck to their avatar bodies. The activity forms part of an unit called ‘Plants as Organisms’, in which student are expected to learn the fundamental properties and behaviour of plants, and is part of a new initiative in Key Stage 3 science to ‘theme’ traditional units in science in a way which will be engaging and related to current media or events. The theme for this unit is the multi-million grossing movie ‘Avatar’ by director James Cameron.

Planning and preparation for this activity began four months ago and involved staff from both the science and ICT department, as well as a highly talented and dedicated team of ABC students who used their virtual modelling talents to create many imaginative alien plants on Tuesday afternoons as an extra-curricular activity. Of course this is not as good as taking them to a real alien planet, but it is a lot safer and it fits into the modern pedagogical concepts of using problem solving approaches to learning.

The original idea came about when Mr. Horrocks mentioned that he was interested in creating a virtual alien planet. Now this may sound  like a rather odd request, but it makes perfect sense if that planet is to be used for Science students to investigate and classify life forms. In less than 10 minutes we had a plan. In fact the idea for the club, the region and work flow for the project all came together very nicely.

We new upon conception that this project would work extremely well in 8th grade science.  It just happens that end of each school year the 7th grade learns to navigate and build in-world in an Open Sim grid. This meant that we already had several skilled builders in the current 8th grade. The LRC had already arranged to lease a region on Jokaydia Grid and it made perfect sense to use Jokaydia for the Science project too. ABC Pandora was launched!

The club took off with a small group of dedicated students from 6th to 8th grade, Mr. Horrocks and Mrs. Garcia. The younger students, despite their lack of experience, picked up the new skills very quickly and soon their imaginations took flight. During the 7 weeks that the club ran, he team created a large variety of virtual 3D Alien life forms, out of basic 3D shapes. In doing so, students chose their shapes care, then modified and linked them to others. They applied textures, effects and even scripts if they wanted their creations to move about. The new life forms were placed within the assigned region, in  their own small micro systems. There they were then named and cloned. Soon ABC Pandora had morphed into a region rich with alien plant forms, as well as a few very strange creatures and was ready for action.

Here are examples of the forms used by students to take notes and annotate their findings.