Week 4 - Dust Echoes

Today's exercise required students to retell a story from the Dust Echoes site. Dust Echoes is a series of twelve animated dreamtime stories from Central Arnhem Land in Northern Australia that enables students to explore a range of indigenous related themes such as Dreamtime and Symbolism.

The site is extremely well done with excellent soundtrack and graphics styles. However, the content is quite dark and may only be suitable for the higher grades.

One way to utilise the site is through children creating a storyboard using Inspiration and Paint (my attempt is below). I chose the Brolga Song which investigates relationships and connections with the natural world. In case you can't tell from the sotry board, the story is about Victor (a song man) who has no Father or Grandfather. Without these figures in his life, he lacks a connection to the land and starts to search for the spirit of his Father and Grandfather through the animals. He finally finds the spirits of Grandfather and Father in two Brolgas. They appear to answer his questions and help him regain his connection with the land.

We then investigated the use of M&M's (or anything similar if worried about allergies) in a graph exercise using Excel. I chose an exercise that would require students to sort the M&M's by colour and count the groupings. This information can then be directly placed in Excel or placed on a parer table/chart. Using a pack of M&M's my Chart is below.

This exercise is ideal for investigation into chance and risk activities, data collection and graph development. The M&M website also has a little educational cotnent which may be useful for further extension activies for studnets.

Greg gave another good lesson with some great content which will be really valuable when I get that elusive job.