Over the past few weeks, a pilot group of primary 6 pupils from St John’s have been developing their journalism skills, reporting on what has been happening in the school in the past month. This is part of a larger project in the school which will see all of the primary 6 pupils involved in reporting the school news in a number of ways during the course of the year.

The team of Newshounds began their journalism lessons by looking at a number of publications including local and national newspapers and a variety of magazines. They learned about fonts and graphic design with a view to putting their knowledge into practice in the development of their own newspaper for the school. Over a number of weeks they collected news from each class, and collated the stories, deciding what to include in the newspaper, and what to leave out.

Working on Pages, part of the Apple iWork suite, the pupils began to put together the newspaper in a half-day workshop last week. The pupils decided they wanted to include sections on “What we’re learning” and “What we’re doing”, providing information on the work and activities of each class in the school.

The final stage in the publication process was carried out yesterday as the pupils proofed the newspaper. Their publication will go to print this morning and will be distributed to all pupils in the school later today.

The pupils wanted to make sure that in addition to print copies, there would be an electronic version available to download. You can download the November issue of St John’s Primary Newshounds here (right-click or control-click to download to your computer). It’s 25mb so it may take some time to download. To view the newsletter you require Adobe Reader (PC/Mac) or Preview (Mac).

December Update

For December’s edition of Newshounds, the production team increased in size as each of the pupils involved took on an “apprentice”. The pupils worked in pairs to research and write each article and to bring together the images and content required for this month’s edition. Download December’s edition of St John’s Newshounds here.

In the early stages of learning a language, learners have a limited range of vocabulary and it’s often difficult to find interesting and motivating ways to practise the few words and phrases they have learned. This was exactly the experience of teachers in St Mark’s, Irvine, and Radio Lingua Schools designed a workshop around providing an additional mode of practice for a group of primary 6 pupils who had just started learning Spanish.

The pupils participating in the workshop only had three Spanish lessons prior to taking part, but in this time they had managed to cover greetings, asking each other ¿cómo te llamas? (what is your name?) and dealing with ages. The workshop aimed to provide an additional opportunity to practise key words and phrases at this early stage of learning.

The first stage of the workshop involved the pupils working with Garageband on a file which included the various parts of a conversation, muddled up. This file had been prepared prior to the workshop, simply recording two voices on two different tracks of Garageband. The same process can easily be achieved in Audacity or other audio editors.

The pupils had to rearrange the recorded ‘regions’ on separate tracks of the Garageband file, making up a conversation between “Carlos” and “Isabel”. The pupils understood the words and phrases contained in the conversation immediately, so rearranging the phrases to make the correct conversation was a straightforward task.

Having completely rearranged the conversation, each pair played their audio file to the rest of the group. They then had to record their own version of the conversation, taking on the roles of “Carlos” and “Isabel” themselves and using the Vocal Transformer plugin in Garageband to make one voice in each group sound a bit more masculine!

The podcasts recorded by each pair can be found below. Just a reminder that in each case one of the voices has a Vocal Transformer filter applied!

Group 1

Group 2

Group 3

This workshop will feature in a forthcoming episode of the Apple Distinguished Educator Learning Series, The Creative Classroom, which will feature ideas and tips for using iLife and iWork in the classroom. More information will be made available in the coming weeks.