Inspiration and M&Ms

In my first post, I talked about using Inspiration to create mind maps and concept maps. Inspiration can also be used to re-tell stories.

In this week's workshop, we used Inspiration to re-tell one of the Dreaming animations from the ABC's Dust Echoes site. This is my retelling of the 'Brolga' animation:

It's really easy to capture the images from the animation and put them into Inspiration. When watching the animation, you press 'pause' at the point you want to capture. Then, press 'print screen' and copy that image into Paint. Cut out the image from the animation and drop it into Inspiration.

Using Inspiration to retell a story in this way requires students to identify the main ideas or events within a story, as well as to sequence those ideas or events. Retelling is a part of the VELS standards in the English domain, and this program could easily be used by students to enhance and add to this part of the curriculum.

The actual Dust Echoes site is also a great resource for students and teachers. The ABC site features 12 animated Dreamtime stories from Arnhem land.















As well as the animations, the site has:

• study guides
• a glossary
• wallpapers
• quizzes

It also has a 'Mash Up' section, where students can use clips from the animation to make their own one minute version of the story. In the classroom, 'Mash Up' could be used in a similar way to Inspiration.

M&Ms

In this week's workshop, we also completed a M&M graphing activity. This activity would be a great way for students to explore Microsoft Excel and graphing.

Pairs of students should be given a packet of M&Ms, count the colours present in the packet, and complete a table with their results:

	Colour	Quantity
1	blue	8
2	brown	12
3	red	15
4	orange	7
5	yellow	4
6	green	7

Students can then use these results to create a graph in Excel:

Obviously, students could use the program to create any kind of graph. Letting students explore the different kinds of graphs available could lead to an interesting and useful discussion about what kinds of graphs are suitable for certain situations and data. In this case, for this kind of data, a pie or bar graph would be most appropriate. Students could also pool their data and come up with a class graph.

• An interesting way to follow on from this activity would be to use the data to explore probability and ratios.