Eaton CC Winthrop Australia Ongoing PD Blog

The Year 7 students in Mr Jaeckal's Technologies class learned to create a procedural screen recording of how to create a product using any of the technologies learned so far this Year. Products ranged from movies using iMovie, interactive presentations using Keynote, graphic rich documents using Microsoft Word or Pages and spreadsheets using Excel or Numbers app. Students learned to use the Screen Recording function in Quicktime app to create their tutorials from their plans.

The students in Mrs Strickland's and Mrs Taedwalt-Wren's HaSS classes learned to develop their research in HaSS into visually rich reports using Pages app. After conducting their research via a Google Advanced Search for information and images students used templates such as 'School Report' within Pages to summarise and inform others of their topics such as the mummification process. Many used the place holders for images, title and paragraph text to input their own information using effects such as Edit Mask, Instant Alpha and text wrapping. Further, students learned to input and configure tables for displaying data if relevant to their product using simple sum and average formulas to work efficiently.

The Year 9 and 10 students in Mrs O'Driscoll's and Mrs Mason's Media and Technologies classes continued to develop logos for their own enterprise or company using Photoshop. The student's learned how to apply 3D, shadow and colour filtering effects to existing images as well as create new images or logo's with text or shapes. Students also applied layering techniques to be able to enhance their logo's further or incorporate backgrounds for their posters, flyers and business cards they were developing. Student's also explored the need to use creative commons or copyright free images if utilising existing images for their products and referenced them via internet citation.

The students in Mrs Snyder's Technologies class conducted self-evaluations of their products for their branding projects. The students created their iMovies focussing on audience association with the brand they had created using relevant audio, product association with a selected theme and inclusion of their logo. Logo's were created using Photoshop and focussed on colour minimisation and image recognition. Finally, the students evaluated their websites, created using Weebly, that focussed on generating interactions with the site visitor e.g. blogs, comments, information requests and 'Contact Us' tabs.

The student's in Mrs Barne's and Mrs Walkington's Maths classes continued to investigate the capacity to convert various values by writing formulas in Numbers app. The Year 7's continued to create their converters of a value of choice as a product for others to use, such as a beach cricket pitch maker. The Year 10's investigated the capacity for values such as currencies to help their teacher, about to go overseas. The currency conversion codes were researched via Google Advanced searches.

The students in Mr Boshoff's Maths class were introduced to the first of many tutorials for their Maths concepts. This particular tutorial on Pythagorean Theorum was developed using the Explain Everything app on the iPad. It enabled the students to see a pre-recorded tutorial of the main functions of the theory and how it can be put into practice via a direct instruction style lesson. The students were then able to access this tutorial online (via Connect) for later reference. More importantly absent students will have access to the tutorials to stay on tack with their peers.

The students in Mrs Driscoll’s Yr. 10 Media and Mrs Snyder’s Yr. 11 Technologies classes embarked on learning to produce and layer voice and audio loops to create sound tracks using Garage Band. Students will create a poetic track using the notepad to read their script and overlay their voice recordings and loops at relevant time intervals that they determine to build up and the gain audience attention quickly and then maintain it for the body, finishing with an outro.

The students in Miss Barnes Maths class learned to create formulas in Excel spreadsheets to convert various measures of distance from empirical to metric values. The students will investigate further measures of distance values to create a comprehensive digital product to help people to be able to carry out tasks involving distance conversions.

The students in Mrs Mason’s Technologies class learned to develop graphics to promote their very own Company/Enterprise as per their Formula 1 Design Project. The students learned how to use layers, colour styling and 3D graphics development in Photoshop to create Logos to use for business cards, letter heads and a promotional poster as stipulated by the project organisers. The students were aided to use the keyboard short-cuts for MacBook while using Photoshop as most tutorials outline keyboard short-cuts for PC. Further, they learned how to create shadow effects by angling layers accordingly in their Photoshop documents.