It is the mid year school holidays and I finally have the chance after a week to sit down and to collect my thoughts and publish some of the fabulous technology and presentations I have seen just in the last week of working in schools.

Perhaps the most special for me was the work I saw at Our Lady of Sacred Heart in East Bentleigh Victoria. I had coached a group of teachers over term one to produce a unit for their Year 9 students. The students would be doing an intensive 5 days of inquiry learning and the teachers wanted to get quite creative and empower the students to develop their skills. Naturally, as with taking on anything new within a school, there were MANY challenges! Perhaps one of the biggest challenges was that the students had to learn how to be responsible for their own learning.

I went to the presentation day at the end of the intensive at witnessed a fabulous range of ideas and thoughts. The students had various questions to answer about Westfield Southland, a regional shopping centre that is continuing to grow and grow (it is now apparantly the fourth largest in Victoria). Along the way I saw some great software that I hadn’t known.

Prezi (http://prezi.com)

This is an alternative presentation software that is remarkable in showing non-linear thinking as well as having ideas displayed in a mappoing environment. I have included an example of  a teacher talking about maths not being linear.

ScrapBlog (http://www.scrapblog.com/)

The following is a ScrapBlog produced by the marketing group of Year 9 students. Remarkable production given they only had 3 days to put it together and meet the rest of their presentation needs!

Animoto (http://animoto.com/)

Finally, the year 9 Leadership group created a reflection piece using Animoto to present to the entire Year 9 body about their experience over the previous week. OIne the main things that struck the girls was that they were in school preparing for jobs that had not been invented yet. This really grabbed them and gave them a context for the week and the presentation.

Our Lady of Sacred Heart Year 9 SL9 Animoto

What are your students creating? Please share and I’ll put them up on the blog!