In 1st year ICT, students get to use Google Apps for Education (Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Picasa etc). This allows us to introduce students to concepts of group work, collaboration, sharing data and time management.
They then move on to Pages and Keynote. Finally, they complete 1st year by making a short film in small groups. The girls pitch a concept for a movie to their ICT teacher, write a script, make a storyboard, shoot the film using any device with a camera and finally edit the film using iMovie. Students are also encouraged to make their own movie soundtrack using GarageBand.
Below are some examples of these short films, which are conceived, written, storyboarded, filmed and edited within around six 40 minute classes.
Students also make podcasts of a selected poem from their English curriculum. They use Keynote to create the podcast and then publish to our podcast server and to YouTube. Below are two examples from this year.
In second year ICT, students work on Scratch projects. Scratch is “a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.”
Students start by learning what exactly a computer program is. They then learn about the concepts of object oriented programming. After learning Scratch, they work in small groups to make games, animations and movies.
Computer club students also learned Scratch this year. We were delighted that 5th year student Harriet Walsh won the animation category in the National Scratch Finals.
Below is Harriet’s project and a selection of second year projects.
Both of these short documentaries made it to the finals of the Fresh Film Festival in Limerick in 2011.
In the Junior school, the girls work across classes in family groups throughout the year. This year, they have been working on countries. This is a selection of 5th class websites created with iWeb.
J6 students have been making stop motion animations using iCanAnimate and iMovie. Here are some examples.
