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Welcome to our class work page. The unit that students are studying in class this term is Ancient Civilisations. During the unit students will be looking at the life styles, beliefs and political structures of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome (these three links will take you to the list of safe web pages found on the resources page and that students can use to gather information about your chosen civilisations).

The assessment for this unit will be for the students to create a photo story of what life in one of the three civilisations was like. By asking the students to create a Photostory using ICT Cross Curricular Priorities and alines the outcomes for this unit with the Year 7 SOSE and Technology curriculum's. Students will be expected to show there higher order thinking through creating and problem solving when using unfamiliar ICT tools to communicate their acquired knowledge of their chosen ancient civilisationto (see Blooms Taxonamy).

In art students will be creating an artifact from their chosen civilistaion and will then take photographs to be edited in Photo Scapeor Picnik. These photos and others, retrieved from web pages with creative common licenses, will be used in making the photo stories at the end of the unit.

The samples were created by the class to show the students how to work within the Picnik photo editing tool. This was done to model how to use the tool Picnik tool. I suppled the photos for the class to edit, and as you can see the students really had fun and went to town with the photo of me.

Class sample 1. The students and I first concentrated on cropping, sharpening and then tinting photos.

Class Sample 2. With this photo the students were give control of the computer. They first cropped the photo so they only had me to work with. They then explored adding text (Mrs D.) and stickers (the gold star). Speech bubbles was the next in order and again adding text. They then discovered the effects and thought that I might look better 'Zombified' (my green face). After this they realised that you could not see my eyes properly and added some great looking eye balls. Even though the applications they used on this tool the students had a great time creating these photos and has now engaged them in this section of the inquiry unit.

Students will be creating a sound file using Finale or editing an existing sound file with Audacity that typifies the sounds that they think would have been heard in their chosen civilisation. As these two tools are new to the students and can be difficult to use at first we, the whole class and I worked on this piece in finale so that the students could explore and create a piece as a group giving support and suggests as we worked through the activity.



At the end of the unit students wil be using these two examples along with other photographic sources to create a photo story using Photostory 3.

The following example was created by the class using clipart. The process of creating a photo story was modeled in class to show the student how to use the program and in bed the images and text.

media type="file" key="photo story Class Sample_1.wmv" width="300" height="300"

(Each of the program/tools links in purple will take you to the free program download page if you would like to use these at home, don't forgot to get premission from Mum or Dad before you download and install them though).