Its about learning. Christmas Movies to Christmas Songs

Curriculum specialist subjects of music, physical education, ICT, library, Vietnamese cultures and art are taught in isolation at British International School. For the class teachers having your students at specialist subjects means you have release time for marking, planning etc. As a specialist subject teacher you tend to work in a silo. The ICT curriculum requires that you try to fit your ICT to meet with the IPC topics. For example Year 6 were studying the brain, so I was able to do some mind mapping work. A barrier to really pushing integration is that I see the students for 1 hour a week, so there is not really the opportunity for a continuation, transfer of learning and flow from ICT to class time.
With the above in mind my goal s8ince starting at British International School was to integrate ICT into the curriculum, have conversations with the class teachers, feed back to the teachers how the students are going, problems success's etc. I also want to showcase ICT around the school and introduce inquiry learning. I have developed a friendship with Natasha, the music specialist and have offered to help her out when she has had musical performances. The students here are very musical. We had a conversation one day and she told me about her Christmas musical evening she was doing to show case music. I boldly offered to help, and from there a plan developed which suited both our needs and subjects. Natasha wanted her performance to be in our gym and the parents would be asked to wait in the foyer, something our parents don't do easily. To entertain the parents while they waited from 5:15 pm to 6:00 pm ICT would make and show Christmas movies based around popular Christmas songs.
Year 5 were up for the challenge, and we began a digital story telling unit, with the students creating jpgs to use in their PhotoStory 3 movies. A prerequisite was that all pictures had to be drawn in Kid Pix and exported as images. The students have previously just grabbed any image off the net and used it, appropriate or not. Images of the movie creators were to be taken and used, as well as images of the choir, the drumming group, the samba group, all of whom were performing on the night. On the night we had 16 movies that ran for a total of 45 minutes. The parents of course liked their child's creation. It wasn't all perfect but it was a beginning and some way to achieving my goals. the students really liked the freedom to express themselves creatively and this challenge. Next year, we'll start earlier and the movies will be better.
In the meantime I'm beginning to put a selection to share with you. Apologies that some are a little pixilated, as I have compressed to load onto the web......... and it is a long way from Vietnam to you, you would expect a few pixels to drop off.
Enjoy, especially the drawings.






And another Rudolph