Monday, March 15, 2010

We are Techno Geniuses!

Mrs N is SO pleased with us! We had the laptops in our classroom ALL day today and we really impressed her with some of our skills!

In the morning, we used this really great site which let us design our own mask and then print it out. We needed to choose 5 animals from the list and it made a mask picture using some of the physical characteristics of those animals. We printed them, coloured them in and wrote descriptions. We needed to type the URL in all by ourselves, which we all did a fantastic job of! We learned that if there are capital letters in a web address, then we need to make sure we do capital letters when we type it in too. Thanks to Jack's mum who came in to help us while we were doing these. Here are the finished products.
Click to play this Smilebox slideshow: Animal Masks

We  also played Tutpup, which we LOVE and we're fantastic at navigating to the right address, logging ourselves in and choosing the right games to play. We are almost completely independent at doing this now. It is fabulous Mental Maths practice.

Our final activity was using software called Tux Paint. It's a painting programme and we had to draw a picture of ourselves. We had some time to play around and explore all the neat things we could do with it. There are all sorts of pictures and special effects we could use. Mrs N is extremely impressed with our touchpad skills. She is amazed by some of the pictures we created because she was expecting it to be very hard for us to draw without using a mouse, but we proved her wrong! All our pictures are posted on our Class Wiki, if you want to see, but here are a couple of examples.
Jake
Catherine


Here we are, being busy techno-bees.

Click to play this Smilebox slideshow: Techno Geniuses

We have two new projects happening in our classroom. The first one is a wiki about Easter Traditions. We've asked some other classes from around the world about the things they do at Easter time and they're going to put in on our wiki. So far, we have classes in Canada, India, Russia, Thailand, America, Poland and the Ukraine participating and Mrs N has asked some more too. We'll be putting up information about  Easter in Australia as well.

Our other project is for Earth Day. We want to find out what other classes are doing to help the environment, so we've made another wiki for them to share with us.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

3 comments:

  1. Dear Smarties,

    I am so impressed with all the work you are doing on your laptops. In the pictures, I noticed that people were helping one another. That's a great way to learn!

    Keep up the fabulous work!

    Mrs. Yollis
    California

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  2. Hi Smarties!
    I loved reading about your 'techno day'. I think room 4 would love to make masks just like yours.
    I also love the new look blog. The colours are awesome!

    Angie (Room 4)

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  3. Hi Jake

    Its wonderful seeing all the great work you,ve been doing, I love the leopard mask you made. Keep up the good work.

    Jakes Mum

    ReplyDelete