This is a lesson with a focus on current events. In this case, we're looking at file sharing, and in particular, Limewire.
Because we've covered this lesson with grade 6, 7, and 8, I would encourage all of you to have a listen:
Topics covered:
- What is peer-to-peer sharing?
- Is Limwire legal/illegal?
- What does the interface mean? What about bitrates?
- What are *we* sharing with the rest of the world?
- How could our information be used for identity theft?
- How do we un-share folders?
- Where can we get legal music?
There was no podcast today - I will only be doing them if I need to brief you on a new topic and/or we need some classroom interaction. You were creating comic "scripts" today.
Your script is very basic - it can be done in Microsoft Word, but needs to be listed like this:
Panel 1:
Background: a city street
View: From the man's right side
Actions: A man is moving from the left side to the right side. He is holding a tennis racket.
Speech: Man: I can't wait to play tennis!
Panel 2:
Background: same as above
Actions: From the man's point-of view we see the street
Speech: Man: I had better look both ways, it's rather dark!
etc...
This script is essential to your comic as it will help you think of ways to sketch later on. Think of yourselves as film directors. Do we always see people in comics from the side? Where else can we put the "camera"?
Try to stick to one idea and evolve it over 6 to 8 (10 at the most!) panels. Also - please try to keep the amount of grisly death scenes to a minimum....
There was no podcast today as you were finalising your design briefs and brainstorms. Some of you have moved further on to sketching design ideas on to paper. Please remember to be very descriptive when making notes on your sketches.
Do not hesitate to point out the very obvious!
Here's what we covered in today's lesson:
Create a new document in Word to create a storyline for your comic strip. It will be much easier to create your comic if you know what should be going on ahead of time!
Think about panels, captions and speech bubbles. How will you lay them out? Who is going to say what in each panel?
Create a list of characters who will be in your comic, as well as the background settings that might be used.
Try to keep your comic idea from six to nine panels. Will your idea be communicated well enough?
Have a look at HowToons – comics that are used to instruct on how to create things.
The overall goal of this task is to effectively communicate the use of your visible safety badge. Will people know how it should be used after reading your comic? If not, what could you do to improve the storyline?
Click here to listen today's lesson. We moved on from our Statement of Problem, and into more detail on the Design Brief.
Now that we have all agreed on what our Statement of Problem and Design Brief are, you will need to start working on your Specification.
Click here to listen today's lesson. We moved on from our Statement of Problem, and into more detail on the Design Brief.
Now that we have all agreed on what our Statement of Problem and Design Brief are, you will need to start working on your Specification.
Click here to listen today's lesson.
We covered storyboarding and using Comic Life today. More information on the Comic Strip Artist's Kit is available link to our lesson on the Westminster Technology department weblog.
Click here to listen today's lesson.
We covered storyboarding and using Comic Life today. Here is a link to our lesson on the Westminster Technology department weblog.
Don't forget to leave a comment on that weblog entry!
Click here to listen today's lesson. We covered an intro to our Visibadge documentation and came up with a suitable Statement of Problem.
Remember that in Word, we use the Header and Footers to display information that is appropriate for each page in our document, and we use Page Breaks (CTRL+Enter) to create new pages in our document.
Your document should have the following listed on the first page:
- Statement of Problem
- Design Brief
- Specification
- Brainstorm
- Research
- Sketches/Drawings
- Materials & Tools
- Production Plan
- Evaluation
Once this information is in, proceed to creating a new page (CTRL-Enter) with a heading from your list at the top of each page. Listen to the podcast to hear the Statement of Problem that we all agreed upon.
Remember! Do not format your work (like Word Art, bold and underlined text)! At the end of the project, we'll add some nice formatting and get Word to do some of the work for us.
Grade 6 are currently building their own web pages using both Dreamweaver and hand-coding with the basic building blocks of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). For those wishing to familiarise themselves with the HTML specification, a PDF version of the HTML Cheatsheet (from Webmonkey) is available for download here.
Technology!