This week is Matariki, so we have been doing lots of learning about Matariki. In our Cybersmart lesson we edited stars in Google Drawing and added in pictures of ourselves as well as some designs. We then added 2 wishes, dreams, desires or hopes that we want to come true over the next year.
What did you do in your class to learn about Matariki?
On Monday morning, many of us got to school to discover a hot air balloon on our field! It got here about 8:30am, and at 9am it started to be inflated (which means blown up).
To make it go up, they used fire. The fire made it go in the air because it made the air inside the balloon hot (and hot air rises).
It only took about 5-10 minutes for the balloon to be filled. Because the ropes were still connected to the ground, the balloon did not fly away.
Mrs Vickers was one of the lucky teachers who got to go up in the balloon – we’re not sure how high she went but probably about 10 metres.
When it had all finished, the hot air balloon people let the balloon back down and put it in a truck to take back to Hamilton!
It was really exciting, and we hope that we get to see another one one day.
The person who brought the balloon to our school, is an ex-student whose Dad used to be our Deputy Principal many years ago.
Over the past 2 weeks, Whaea Stacey has been teaching us how to use Google Slides to make animations. Here are the steps.
Step 1: Find a background you like (or you could create your own)
Step 2: Find a character you want to use, and remove the background using remove.bg
Step 3: Place your character on your background.
Step 4: Duplicate your slide (control + d)
Step 5: Move your character a little bit
Repeat until you have finished.
Some of us wanted to change our background, so we had to make sure our character had moved off the slide before we changed it (because it can’t teleport!)
If you wanted to add a second character, you just follow the instructions again. You can put your 2 characters in a group to move them at the same time.
Here are some of our animations. We hope you like them!
Ida
Isla
Talofa Lava!
This week in Cybersmart we learnt a bit more on how to use Google Docs.
We practiced changing our font so it was bold, italic or underlined. We changed our font style, size and colour.
We also learnt how to add in images (through our camera, the internet or a drawing) as well as insert images and special characters.
The coolest thing we learnt how to do was Voice Type! Some of us already know how to speak into our microphone to search things, but now we can type onto our Google Docs as well! Very exciting!
We haven’t all quite finished, but here are some of the screenshots of our work:
What is your favourite thing to do on Google Docs?
One of our Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu Classes – Team Koru from Glen Taylor School had a post up a few weeks ago about using Explain Everything to create dinosaurs with their heads. We really liked that idea and wanted to do one similar, but because we use Chromebooks and not iPads we had to do it slightly different.
Today, we got to create a creature on Google Drawings using either the polyline (which is still a bit tricky for some of us) or lots of shapes together to create a creature of our choice.
We then took a picture of just our heads and used remove.bg to remove the background and anything extra that was still in the picture. Finally, we put this picture onto the head of our creature. It was really fun. We hope you enjoy them!
This week in Cybersmart we learnt about what is OK to share online and what we shouldn’t share. We watched a video, made a list and then sorted out pictures to say whether we thought things were personal or private information.
We then used Google Drawing to make a picture where we dragged in things about us that we thought it was OK to share. We decided that it was not OK to share our phone number, home address or date of birth. Everything else on the outside of the drawing was OK to share with everyone.
We also learnt how to change the background on a google drawing, how to replace an image and change the word art to our own name.
We have entered a competition with other schools in the Manawatu/Whanganui region where we have to answer questions on Sumdog (which is maths!) to get points.
The more questions you get right – the more points you get! If you win, the prize is Sumdog money which you can use to dress your avatar or get into your garden or house.
The competition started last week and goes until tomorrow (so for a whole week).
At the moment WE ARE FIRST!!! Isla and Tyler are in the top 10.
Room 11 is trying really hard to catch us, so we need to make sure we stay ahead!
We have really enjoyed this competition it is helping us with our maths.
Do you use sumdog?
Today, Whaea Stacey showed us some photos of some places she had visited – except she was in the same clothes and pose for every place! Some of us quickly realised that she was tricking us and had somehow faked the photos!
We learned how to add a background into a Google Slide of a place we would like to pretend to be. We then took a photo of ourselves (or had a friend take one if we wanted a whole body picture) and uploaded our photo to remove.bg. A few of us needed to do some extra touch ups as there was still people or something else in the background.
Mrs Vickers is going to use this idea again with us next term when we are doing a history topic on where our families are from as we will be able to put ourselves into that place. It is also a cool idea to use to help with reading or writing topics!
Check out our slide deck below:
Today we learnt about Kawa of Care for our chromebooks.
We made a list of things we should be doing to look after our devices. This is our list:
We took pictures of some of us showing how we can follow these rules and will put the pictures up around where our chromebooks live.
Hug Hold your Chromebook
Shark your lid when the teacher is talking
Gentle Hands when typing
Only be on websites you are allowed to go on
No food or drink next to our chromebooks
We then did a kawa of care quiz where we had to answer questions about how to look after our chromebooks, we only got 2 wrong so had to do the quiz again until we got 100%.
How do you show that you look after your chromebooks?
Today we learnt how to use the touchpad on our chromebook.
Most of us found this pretty tricky.
We were learning how to use the polyline tool to follow a dot to dot. This was the most tricky because we had to click once, then move our mouse and then click once again and repeat this for all the dots. If we accidentally clicked twice we had to start again.. When we did finish the polyline dot to dot we realised it was a star!
We also got to do a puzzle game where we had to drag pieces together to make the puzzle look right. You could give this a go here: Drag and Drop Jigsaw
Finally, we learnt how to take a screenshot of our work – you press control, shift and show windows and you can either take a whole screen shot or a smaller screen shot of part of your screen.
We will keep practicing using our touchpads so we can get even better!
Do you have any tips for using the touchpads on your chromebooks?
Kōwhai @ Levin North School