Blogging

The courses we attended in the holidays went well, I brought back lots of great ideas from the week long one in Auckland, and found a cool new free art program for children at the two day one in Napier (plus saw children using it on interactive whiteboards in Auckland).
Check out ArtRage2 (starter edition) at
http://www.ambientdesign.com/
It's a New Zealand programme.
While you're checking artrage 2 out you might like to search for software avaliable on line at http://www.tki.org.nz/r/ict/software/
This is a government education site that'll search you out lots of cool stuff.

One of the new ideas I brought back that we're keen to try is to put up our children's art onto the blog. There's lots of wall space on the web.

Another idea is making movies, already one family has taken the video camera home and a short dvd about riding a bike without training wheels has been produced.

Then following on from the bike movie, one of the children watching it talked to me about making a fairytopia dvd, so together we made up a story board drawing pictures to represent her story, then I improvised a script for her and her volunteer actors as they acted it out. Add in some editing and we had our own fairy movie.
Maybe we'll make costumes and re shot it, maybe the children will create their own scripts and more movies, who can tell what will happen as we get more experienced.

We also recorded onto DVD some of the great thinking going on as a group of children set out to catch a mouse they had decided was under the shed and various other places.

If you're wondering about browsign the web with children (never a good idea to push the next blog button I'm told) go to http://www.netsafe.org.nz/, this is a non profit group doing great stuff.

If you're wondering what other kindergartens do check out http://manaiakindergarten.blogspot.com/, they where one of New Zealand's first kindergartens to blog and they also have some advise about safe blogging.

safe blogging everyone and remember to post a comment!