For the past couple of days my students have been preparing slideshow presentations about Australian Rules Football. This was inspired by our conversation with Mr. Lamshed the other day. After talking to Mr. Lamshed many of my students were confused by what Australian Football was, so I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to integrate a variety technology strategies in order to better understand the sport. In order to complete the slideshows we used Google Docs as our canvas for this project.

In our project I used an application called Jing, this valuable tool allows users to create screencast with voice over instructions that is both very handy and user friendly.

Since creating a presentation was new to my students I created my own screencast. This allowed me to not only give written instructions, but also add a nice visual and recorded voice instructions via a screencast. This was very beneficial to students and myself, because eliminated the need to repeat instructions over and over again.

We also used our Ning chat as a tool in this project. We were able to use chat as a means to answer simple Q & A discussions. If my students for got a step or needed help finding a source, I could scaffold by using chat and share links and other types of information.

Then the final product. Students used various site for information, including Google, Wikipedia, and The Australian Football League website. Below are a couple of presentations my students prepared.

Overall this was such a worth while project to do in conjunction with our Skype call with Mr. Lamshed. My students really enjoyed conducting their research and learning about this outstanding sport.

Mr. McClung