Aliens come to Barking

Over the last two weeks I have been working with a number of Year 2 classes using 2Create. I used this software as it is a great platform for making multi-modal books, with little distraction from complicated toolbars. I notice that on the Keys to Learning DVD, the Keys Stage 1 videos seem to imply the use of pre-prapred PowerPoint templates that the children complete. This is fine and it is essentially what I did for the Aliens story, but with 2Create the children can add multi-modal elements very easily.



So here was the lesson, I was working on children combining text and images. From my misty Key Stage 1 experience I remembered that you could not just provide a blank sheet and ask the children to do a story.Therefore I provide a scaffold, which they could add their own text and clip art.Those that were able could add their own ideas to blank pages and even extend this further by adding more elements of speech, sound and images from the Internet or a digital camera.

I begun the lesson with a video clip of Aliens landing, and yes regular readers I did use Doctor Who!. If you watch the clip you will realise that I had to edit it a bit, and as I was in Redbridge school, where Youtube is blocked I made sure I had downloaded it as an flv file in Keepvid at home first!.




I emphasised that our aliens that visited Barking were friendly and they only wanted to do things that the children enjoyed, such as visiting the mall and the cinema. Below you can see a very bad upload an upload of the flash file.Of course I gave the children a 2create file that they used for their work, they added aliens where they were missing alongside text, sounds and animation to enhance the pages. If you would like the original file let me know.I have to say, though I think this is obvious, the reason why this worked is that it used simple imagery. Just pictures that I'd taken or downloaded of the local area that the children walk along every day.