School

I’ve been working with 8-10 year olds trying out the new Primary Framework literacy/narrative/film strand. The suggested and provided film resource “The Piano” http://tinyurl.com/66r4n2 is a powerful narrative animation to an evocative piano accompaniment.

We have immersed ourselves in this over three weeks and it has been a rich experience. We captured a set of images and first used Voicethreads to explore initial thoughts, then emotions associated with the different parts of the story. We moved on to annotate the images in PowerPoint and then used PhotoStory 3 to recreate their own versions of the narrative. (We have found that many of the children are quite shy doing voice recordings so we are planning to focus more on this after half term.)

We realised that the power of the images in this narrative setting was that the emotional context provided by the images and sound allowed the children to create their own narrative in quite a complex but original way. A common writing task based on a class book for example might use the plot as a starting point, drawing on their own experiences. With six images they were able to build and elaborate their versions, playing with the plot, with time and with characterisation. This is still work in progress but a couple of the children did blog about it, see http://leia.shepeaustow.net/2008/05/06/the-piano/ and http://connor.shepeaustow.net/2008/05/08/the-piano/.

I have been mulling over what quality might mean when applied to a digital image and have come to the conclusion that it is not an especially useful concept!

Appropriate, yes!

How good an image is can be defined in how well it meets its purpose and this could conceivably be a blurry, poorly lit and composed image taken by a child in a role play area of the classroom that totally encapsulated what was going on for a particular child.

Did you read Presentation Zen (http://www.presentationzen.com/)? Garr Reynolds argues persuasively for the use of professional images in our presentations- getting the right image is important and adds enormously to a professional presentation (presumably the cost of acquiring fantastic images from iStockphoto.com is peanuts compared with the fees that he gets for presenting!- actually I loved the book and will never do bulleted PowerPoints ever again).

Lovely images can take your breath away but we are not just looking to wow our classes.

These images (among others), used as stimulus, were found last week by children in a class who were investigating the dangers of electricity. They provided an excellent introduction and discussion point.

and this one promoted a lot of discussion about insulators and conductors in real life. These are ordinary pictures but they did prove powerful in a particular context and did promote lively discussion.