The Power of Publishing

Recently I ran two online workshops via Google Meet for the Emmanual Foundation's Innovative Schools Project.  The workshops were to help their graduates try to meet the needs of online learning now that all schools in Indonesia are closed due to the pandemic.

The first workshop was designed for teachers that are new to Google apps. I introduced Slides and led the participants through how to make a simple layout with layered photos in Slides. 

I wanted to keep things very simple so we stayed completely within the app and used the Google Image Search that is inside. I taught the participants how to add .png to a photo search to get vector images with transparent backgrounds. 

The task I set was to make a lesson that used photos and instructions. The participants were so keen that the workshop went on for 2 hours. 

For the follow-up workshop, I taught the participants to create a virtual reading room. Here is the example that I used Virtual Reading Room.

The example that I used with the group was in Indonesian. I published these stories almost 8 years ago. They were written as a part of the backpack project that I did back in 2012 in a small village in North Sumatra. I worked with the children in that village to write every day stories about their life. 

There was a lot of discussion about these books and I hope that I inspired these teachers to try publishing stories of their own. I used Book Creator to publish these books and they even have a free version that includes 40 books. 

I was so proud to see that these teachers (70 attended my session) were able to make their own reading rooms. Here's an example from the class. Here is a screenshot of a virtual reading room created by one of the participants. She even put links to each book and filtered the YouTube videos with SafeTube. I'm happy because I did go in detail about online safety and whilst YouTube has so many awesome videos, it's much safer to filter out unwanted content. 

Backpack Classroom Level 2

Tomorrow marks the second time that I will run the Backpack Classroom. This time I am taking my current class which is a Grade 4 class. They use Macbooks 1:1. Actually I will go with the whole year level. Our aim is to create 39 books.

What is the Backpack Classroom? 

This is a simple idea that I had at the end of last year. It is a way to help children with limited access to technology to create a digital book and to publish it. I originally took a backpack of iPads to a remote village in Sumatra to teach the children there to create digital books. It resulted in 9 books that to date have been downloaded over 20,000 times.

So what is different this time?

This time I am taking my current class from the International school that I currently teach at. My class has Macbooks as their 1:1 devices. We will keep it simple by using Keynote and Photo Booth to record the story. 

Where are you going?

We will go to the Santi Rama School in Jakarta. This is a school for deaf children. We have chosen to visit this school as our current topic is about how we can modify messages to suit a particular audience. The books will be tri-lingual. That means that there will be 3 languages included on each page. The children from the Santi Rama school understand Indonesian. They are all deaf children and use sign language to communicate. To make the books more accessible for an international audience we will translate the stories into English. My students will act as publishers and then promote the finished books to an international audience via their blogs and other online forums. 

Where did you get the idea to go to Santi Rama?

I have been visiting this school with different classes over the years. I have always gone to see them so that my students can make new friends and learn about communicating in sign language. This time the focus will be on to help each deaf student to create a digital book that we can publish to the world for other children to read. 

How will you make it work?

The idea is for each SWA student to have a Santi Rama student partner. The Santi Rama students have been preparing for tomorrow and have already written their stories on paper and made some illustrations. My students have been learning about how to create a digital book with embedded video on each page. They have also been learning how to create digital artwork to illustrate the book.

We are really looking forward to tomorrow. More information to come after our visit.

Inquiry Into Life on a Limited Budget

My class 5MJ has just started a new unit of work. The theme is Sharing the Planet and our focus is about resources and how they are not equally shared in the world. This is particularly the case in Indonesia.

This morning 5MJ were given a task to follow up their front loading done last week. In that activity the students were asked to work out how they could buy a meal for four people with Rp. 14.000. The students thought that it was impossible, so today we decided to inquire further.

FINDING OUT

The students worked in groups. They brainstormed what kinds of food they could buy and recorded the questions asked by the group as they tried to find out. Each group found that they had more questions than answers.

STUDENT INQUIRY QUESTIONS

Where can we buy the food? (Jinny)

Is 14,000 enough? (Bernhard)

How much money do we need to get us to BSD and Jakarta? (Regina)

Where can we find food that is cheap and near to BSD? (Keaton)

Where can we find food that is less than 14,00o? (Jessica)

What food can we buy with only 14,000? (Regina)

How much is a meal for a person? (Jinny)

Is bread enough for eating in one meal? (Gabi) – Can we just eat bread for this meal?

How long does the big aqua last? (Gabi)

What different foods are cheap? (Shereen)

What if the person can’t even buy the food? (Gabi)

How much is tempe? (Zubin)

What is the price of something cheap to drink? (Lisa)

How much nutritious food can the people with less money eat? (Shereen)

What kind of foods are too expensive for people who have less money? (Shereen)

Can you just live on water? (Zubin)

Each group asked their group members about which food they eat the most of every day. In each group, rice was the food that was eaten the most. We agreed that we needed to include rice in this meal that we are trying to plan.

Ms Jane shared a video that she took last night when she went to a warung (small shop) to buy rice. Ms Jane bought 3 kinds of rice, Rp. 6.200, Rp. 6.500 and Rp. 6.800.

We took at look at each of the three liters of rice that was purchased and compared them. We wondered how much does it weigh? Each student made an estimation after feeling the weight.

Many students talked about how much rice they cooked at their house and where they bought the rice.

Next we decided to COOK the rice. We had a big discussion about how to cook the rice. Jinny was the only student who knew that you had to wash the rice before cooking it. We decided to make three groups of four to work together to cook the rice. Ms Agnes had bought her rice cooker to school for us to use.

We need to find out more …. we wondered how much rice costs at a supermarket.

And then we wondered …

How is rice distributed across the world?

Our current UOI is ‘Sharing the Planet’ and our central idea is:

“It is our shared responsibility to ensure resources are more evenly distributed.”

Gabi found a great website http://irri.org which is the International Rice Research Institute. From the website we can learn about which countries consume the most rice in the world. Here is a pie chart showing which countries consume the most rice.

Image from: http://irri.org/knowledge/publications/rice-today/maps/who-eats-the-most-rice

So, back to our first inquiry …

How can we make a meal with only Rp 14.000 budget?

Jessica had a great idea! She asked, “Why don’t we make fried rice with the rice that we cooked today?” We agreed that this might be possible with our budget of Rp. 14.000. We know that one liter of rice can cost as little as Rp. 6.200.

Now the class is looking into what ingredients are in fried rice.

Some of the students said that eggs are in fried rice. Ms Jane shared a video that she took last night at an egg shop in the village. To buy the fresh eggs it costs Rp. 13.500 per kilo. I wonder how many eggs are in one kilo?

(video coming soon)

We must decide who will being which ingredient and that person must know the price of that ingredient.

iPads Apps for Jakarta World Academy

We are preparing the image for our first trial use of iPads at Jakarta World Academy. I have selected a few apps from my own image to test use at the school. Here are just some from my selection. The age range for these apps are K1-Gr 1.

JWA Apps

Classroom Behaviors in Chinese Intermediate Lessons

We had some fun in Chinese lessons today using Skitch and the laptop webcams. Skitch is a great little app that allows the user to take photos and mark them up with hand written notes. Take a look

Pre Kindergarten makes a Chicken Life Cycle

Today in Pre Kindergarten we made our first UOI task with the iMacs. We used the software Comic Life and took some images from Sparklebox.co.uk

I thought that perhaps it would be difficult to get such young children (these kids are 3 and 4 years old) to create something by following a procedure on the computer. Again and again the ability of the 'Digital Native' never ceases to amaze me. These kids were easily able to drag and drop the images into Comic Life and re-size them and rotate them to make a life cycle. One student even changed the background colour and font inside the program without any help from the teachers.

Wow, at this rate we will begin publishing our own story books. Stay tuned ...
Here are two examples of the student work produced in the lesson today. As I explained in my previous post, the students have been learning about life cycles and have read many storybooks and even held live chickens that a parent brought to the classroom.

Antagonist vs Protagonist Comic

Here is a creative use of Comic Life in an English lesson. The students were asked to create a debate comic about Magellan. The students had to create both sides of the argument about whether Magellan was a hero or not. I think that this is a wonderful language activity that develops open mindedness. Click on the images to view them at full size.