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The Qatar Academy, Doha, Qatar – Day 5
Our last day at Qatar Academy started with 2 classes of Year 4 pupils and their teachers, followed by a session with some key people (including Sandy Sheppard, the Principal, and Joneen Walker, vice Principal), exploring, sharing, discussing some of the outcomes of this huge, and busy, week.
Next we were joined by the Year 6 teachers, swiftly followed by a whizz of a roller coaster ride with 66 Y3 pupils!!
We ended the day squeezing in a Skype chat with @deputymitchell about Quadblogging, whilst spending time with the TIFs rounding off this full on week. Thank you Steve, Stacey, Scott, for you incredible organisation and energies!
Thank you to Craig and Karyn for looking after us so generously too.
MORE TO FOLLOW ON ALL OF THE HAPPENINGS, AND RESULTS, OF THIS REMARKABLE WEEK …SOON
Well done to all of the folk in Doha, for keeping up with the pace and challenges. WATCH THIS SPACE
Thank you to Jannie Kruger for sending us some of his children’s writing:
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The Qatar Academy, Doha, Qatar – Day 4
Today’s timetable was gloriously packed: lessons with 60 Year 6 pupils and their teachers followed by another lesson with the rest of the Year 6 pupils, and their teachers. Next up was a session with the Year 4 and Year 5 teachers, swiftly followed by a lesson with the Year 1 pupils, exploring a beach with buckets of sand and bowls of water.
Lessons over, and all the primary school staff joined us in the afternoon for an iPad session where the teachers wandered through Epic Citadel, made a pot and spotted a pick-pocket. Overheard by one teacher, “we’re kinda just cruising around”. That’s what pick-pockets do isn’t it?
We ended the day working with a graduate class of senior and primary school teachers working towards their Certificate of Educational Technologies through the University of Buffalo, The State University of New York. Having seen a lot of the workshops already during the week the primary teachers dissappeared for a while to solve the problem of the pick-pockets baby using a range of Web2 tools while the senior school teachers got to see the ‘out of this world presentation’
Using Google Sites to create a ‘pick-a-path’ novel
The Technology Intergration Facilitor Team here at Qatar Academy are doing amazing, creative and supoortive projects working alongside the classroom teachers and their pupils. One of the team, Scott Johnson, has kindly shared one on the projects here:
This is a digital storytelling project I’ve been helping a Grade 4 class with this year. The story is all about a talking penguin (their class mascot) who has managed to turn an old ipod into a time machine. However, it doesn’t quite work properly. When the ‘forward’ button is pressed it will go to any random time and place in the future. If the ‘back’ button is pressed, it will go to any random time and place in the past.
At the end of each chapter the reader has a choice: do they want to press the ‘forward’ button or the ‘back’ button? For each option, there is a link to another chapter.
Having started with some teacher modeling, and some shared writing lessons, the students are now creating chapters both in pairs and individually. The important things for them to focus on are tense (present), perspective (the penguin’s), audience awareness (which could be anyone, however the reader is actually in the story, making the decisions) and of course the basic structure of narratives. 
The fact that this story is told on a Google site has allowed the students to embed a variety of other presentation tools to make the story more interesting. For example, students have used Vocaroo to simply tell their story orally. They have used the Interactive Whiteboard to place Chuck in different backgrounds. They have also used a programme called Oddcast to create a talking avatar of the toy penguin. 
This project is still very much a work in progress. In the next few weeks we plan to add animations from Domo Animate and Pivot Stickfigure Animation, Green Screen movies, musical soundscapes for the reader to listen to as they read a chapter, photographs of student artwork. Now that we have Myst 3 in our school (thanks to Myster Rylands!), we will also be inspiring the students to describe an even greater range of scenes and expect the writing to become a lot more expressive!
It has certainly been a highly motivating activity so far, with the students often very disappointed when I tell them that school’s finished and they have to go home!
To follow the story as it progresses, please check out the link below.
https://sites.google.com/a/qaprimary.org/4epick-a-path-story/
Scott Johnson Technology Integration Facilitator Qatar Academy
Thank you Scott. This is inspiring and extremely useful.
