Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Top Trumps

I'm often accused of having 2simple tattooed across my chest. Actually this is not the case, I do use and actively promote other software. Hey I would not be the balanced individual you see before you if that were not the case.

A favourite of mine at the moment is Information Workshop. The software is excellent for the Year 5 Database units. And the good thing about this software is that there are many IW files floating around on the internet. For example Stockton have produced and excellent crime fighting project, here there are clues and crooks to find from descriptions by members of the public.

With databases in mind, it got me thinking how would I introduce terms like fields, records and data? I found inspiration amongst my Doctor Who Collection of toys and collectibles. The top Trump cards. A pack of around 50 cards with data. Or 50 or so records each with 1 long text field and 5 numerical fields. I begun to construct one of my own as a distraction technique this evening.

The results are below:

This was made in Office 2007, which is sooo nice to use, though I am not sure BECTA bigged it up as much as they could have.

Oh very excited today I managed to Video conference with Gary (our chief of Technical support). It was a bit pixelated and there was a bit of a time delay but I think perseverance and a bit more tinkering will mean better quality will prevail. I really want to link one of schools up with a contrasting locality that truly is contrasting. I think the hardest part of the whole video conferencing thing is not the kit but the ideas and the project!!

1 comment:

Two Whizzy said...

Hi Anthony, good to hear from you. Last weekend was a chore, but I am hoping it will be worth it in the long run. This Top Trumps idea has unending possibilities. I have a group of year 3s who are going through that dinosaur phase at the moment, would be great to build on their enthusiasm to develop this into a database, and have a set of class top trump cards to play with at the end to boot.

Have uploaded a thing about multimodality and 2 create a story. Hope it begins to address your query about keyboards and the literacy framework. You have asked me several times about this, so thought I would respond. I would like colleagues to see text handling units as if they were extensions of the strategy, and include them in their plans as part of the literacy hour, rather than planning to teach them completely separately in order to complete a section of the curriculum. This however will I am sure require an analysis of the framework and help inorder for them to identify how the ICT skills structure fits. Please let me know when you publish your lead teacher workshop materials. Would be really interested. Your E safety links were really useful.