ICT - Grade 6 Simple Machines.

Grade 6 students have been working on their current inquiry: Where we are place and time. The central idea is "Past Civilisations left legacies that are present today". In ICT class, students made some simple machines to understand the basic concept and try to imagine previous civilizations' lifestyles as well as shape discovery and inventions in their minds. Here are the projects they were determined to carry out:

Self-moving rubber band car

Flying long-distance plane

Bow and arrow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKnAhMKnOuc

and more...

ICT - Preschool: Letter tracing

As all we know, tracing letters is an easy way for children to learn to write each letter and it is an important precursor to freehand writing. Also, legible handwriting depends on being able to properly write each letter.

SIS preschool students trace the letters with their fingers. They do this action slowly and try to stay on the dotted lines. If children's finger goes off of the line, they start over. Depending on their interest, kids have gone in alphabetical order or taped the letters from the bottom which they wanted to practice! This app helps them practice their letter recognition, handwriting skills and fine motor skills.

ICT - Grade 5: Lightbot

Lightbot is an educational video game for learning software programming concepts. The goal of Lightbot is to command a little robot to navigate a maze and turn on lights. Grade 5 students arrange symbols on the screen to command the robot to walk, turn, jump, switch on a light and so on.

The maze and the list of symbols become more complicated as the lessons progress. While using such commands, the students learn programming concepts like loops, procedures and more, without entering code in any programming language.

Once they have understood what programming means on a general level, and that is about thinking algorithmically to get to a solution, they began to see how Lightbot relates to programming.

 

ICT - Grade 2: Learn and practice keyboarding.

Grade2 students have continued to learn and practice keyboarding for 4 weeks. They use "TypingClub" is an educational platform for this purpose. It is web-based and fully customizable, so students can practice in class, at home, or wherever an internet connection can be found.

At the very beginning, students found this activity pretty hard. They kept looking at the keyboard on the computer.

However, watching the 2-minute short video clip about its rule to be successful, grade 2 students realized that there is actually one rule to achieve successful results: Never ever look at the keyboard! Grade 2 students made decision on covering the keyboard with their hand towel or something else to avoid glancing at. After that students started to earn 5 stars in most of the lessons. They have shown good results on Home Row keys so far, so it's decided to continue with Top Row key. They can handle it easily for sure.

Why teach keyboarding?

Typing faster is not the primary objective of keyboarding; rather it is a desired side effect. Once your students are able to type with all ten fingers without needing to look down at the keyboard, their overall productivity when using a computer will improve dramatically.
When typing with two fingers, the visual and frontal cortices of the brain are forced to focus on where individual keys are located. Keyboarding removes this burden, enabling students to work on things like sentence structure and grammar while they type. To help students in the classroom, the best thing you can do is to make sure students are not looking at the keyboard.

Source: https://s.typingclub.com/docs/user-guide/introduction/about-typingclub.html

ICT - Grade 1 has continued to code with Colby mouse.

Colby is the programmable mouse to introduce coding concepts to grade1 students. This time they have had hands-on coding fun!

They have been using analytical thinking, problem-solving skills and step-by-step programming to get the mouse to the cheese. All buttons on the mouse are specified by different colors with matching coding cards to make programming and sequencing easy.

Children build and use tools for amazing discoveries, boost their brains into high gear and design solutions for real-world problems. Grade1 students develop critical thinking, coding skills, problem-solving and logical skills with Code & Go Robot Mouse Activity Set.