Manga Magic

Make your own manga character

Well, that was a  lot of fun. We were discussing ideas for revamping our classroom areas and corridors to breathe some fresh , 21st century life into them…the great corridor makeover. We settled on the idea we’d get some manga images going which the students could create and we would get them to be reformatted and utilised in different ways . Manga images are bright, cheerful, massively popular and can be used to teach so much vocabulary and expression as we make them. This will largely be a Japanese initiative but the dolldivine site is something we can use in French too. We found some good sites and apps for generating and producing manga characters so I’ll share them with you:

Manga Girl
Top 25 free Manga apps
Manga studio
Manga generator

Get the classroom bling out

Image iPhone via BeFunky .

I remember it well. In the 90s students were coming into my classroom complete with glo pens, highlighters, glitter pens, little pots of glitter and their work was full of glitter, gloss, colour and bling. I have always let them set out their work in a way that suits them . If it is to be handed in I ask for a name,title and date. That shift from pens, pencils and rulers to glitter and bling was a significant one. They would sharpen little piles of coloured pencil and use bits of sandpaper and paper to shade their work. I am going through a similar shift in my Year 8 classroom this year because of mobile technology. These students won’t have laptops at school until year 9 and they can rarely get into the computer room this year because we are in a rebuilding programme which has meant rooms have had to be reallocated or preferential block bookings have had to occur. By now I am glad I spent time at the beginning of the year looking at apps which were suitable for iPads and iPhones.  I am  equally glad I have got the iPads out and let them explore and discover them in an educational setting. Magic is occurring. Necessity is the mother of invention. My students know if they ask permission and tell me what they are going to use and why, they can use their smartphone in class. They also know if they do the wrong thing their phone is locked up in the filing cabinet until the end of the lesson. So far I have locked up three this year. With technology pressure on for students who have grown up with it and have been surrounded by it, bit by bit they are shifting to mobile apps for their work. They have not demanded it nor expected it. They have just naturally gone that way within my boundaries. I haven’t pushed it. I haven’t insisted. I haven’t suggested. I have just encouraged them when they are doing clever things on their phone. Today was a real eye opener. Some students were doing their homework on their phones. Why? We had finished what I wanted to do and I gave them a choice of exercises to do or finishing off their assignments for tonight and tomorrow’s lesson. Some students brought me their work on their phone to show me to see if they were getting it right. One student emailed me the work so I could check it. They have got some really good productivity going. What they can’t do is  easily know how to get it to me. We have choices at the moment . Some can easily email. Some can go home and get it onto their computer and bring it to me on a USB. Some can Bluetooth. At the moment I am working with what they know. Were it earlier in the year this hotch potch approach would be totally unacceptable. For now I am looking at the success rate and staying with what each student can do. Each week the number is growing. The ones using their phones are totally absorbed and happy. The bling of technology is just as an effective means of engaging them in content and problem solving as the glitter and glo days of the nineties. Soon there will be a few students who can do all their work on their phone and that will be a big breakthrough. These phones are expensive and have a capacity to do a lot which we need to explore as partners in learning. It is great to see them being used as anywhere, any time learning devices.

Frivolous technology innovation

If you could have a technological innovation in your classroom, what would it be? I’ve decided I’d like the equivalent of SIMS thought bubbles. I’d love a little switch or scanner I could use so I could see thought bubbles pop out of the top of my students’ heads. It would make life so much easier if I could quickly see why they were not concentrating, why they are hyper, why they look like they are in shock, why they are all droopy. The SIMS also have moodlets so it would be good to know if the students were hungry or grumpy. Maybe the moodlets would be better. I don’t play Sims so I am not sure which I should plump for. I have seen the SIMS screen a million times when my daughter lived at home and I have had students who have used SIMS for their French to very great effect. We teach students from all sorts of backgrounds and family situations. We teach students who pop in from overseas or interstate and so a teacher has to adjust very quickly to new personalities and characters. It would make life so much easier if I could do a quick scan and see the issues at a glance. I know it would probably cut across privacy requirements but at the moment I am just putting my frivolous wish out there. They already have voice mood monitoring tools for phone calls. I just want a quick scan to see indicators of mood and issues.

Encourage citizen scientists

Project Noah makes great use of mobile technology and is well suited to upper primary, junior secondary students. It is an app which is designed to help them discover their local environment. There are awards to be earned and an opportunity to see how others who belong to the project are doing. The app is colourful and clear. Students can help identify finds but also discover things as well. They can participate in challenges and generally learn how to share information online and then see what can be done with that information. They can see that by collaborating and taking on challenges they can contribute to research and a wide body of  global knowledge. The app is free and ran really well on my iPad but it would suit a smart phone easily and so contribute to making good use of those expensive pocket devices. Great believer in developing ideas and challenges for mobile technology so that students have better options for use.

500 words into the future

500 words into the future is a ZNET blog by Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe. They do a lot to demystify technology in the real world of hi tech because they both write authentic posts about what they are actually thinking and doing as high tech people. It might be as practical decorating the Surface tablet as well as working out how to keep it from slipping off your lap if you have short legs to looking at what the market is and could be doing and then, the sorts of real life situations which occur requiring hi tech input and thinking. Digitising the undigitisable one page at a time is a post that meant a lot to me as a teacher. I was looking at how this person with a lot of technical knowledge was solving a critical paramedic problem so that ambulance staff could manage the onboard assessment of patients and thereby give the patients a better chance of correct treatment as soon as they got to hospital. This is the stuff life is made of and the sort of thing students need to realise . It’s TeFL Domain 4 – Connecting their learning with the real world. After a couple of minutes of reading you can see how important technology, problem solving, logical thinking, collaboration, communication, literacy and networking are. You can read any of the posts on this blog and come to a realisation of how important technology is in the world and when the information is taking you 500 words at a time into the future then you can feel as you read it that you belong there. These two make technology very accessible but also very authentic.