ELEMENTARY CURRICULUM TECHNOLOGY RESOURCES

INTRODUCTION:

This lesson is designed to guide teachers through an author study that completes with students presenting their information in Hyperstudio or Powerpoint.

LEARNING OUTCOMES:

LANGUAGE ARTS:

It is expected that students will:

• explain their preferences for specific authors, genres, types of print, visuals, and media
  
• use questioning, predicting, summarizing, inferring, skimming or scanning, and graphic organizers to accomplish specific purposes for reading, viewing, and listening
  
• use text and electronic media features, including indices, tables of contents, and keyword searches, to locate specific information or material
  
• identify and represent the main ideas or events in stories, poetry, informational material, videos, and other media
  
• use information they have read, heard, or viewed to develop questions and activities that will extend their understanding
  
• organize details and information they have read, heard, or viewed using a variety of written and graphic forms, including charts, webs, and maps
  
• describe information provided in simple and direct illustrations, maps, charts, or other graphic representations
  
• develop personal responses to materials and support their responses with reasons, examples, and details
  
• use grammatically correct language when writing and speaking
  
• locate, gather, select, and record information for specific purposes from various human, print, and electronic sources
  
• create various personal and transactional communications, including real and invented narratives, poems or lyrics, summaries or retellings, descriptions, letters, informal oral presentations, charts, and posters

COMPUTER SCOPE AND SEQUENCE:

• Write a simple caption or story to accompany a picture.
  
• Save, name and retrieve files.
  
• Change the line attributes (thickness, pattern, arrows).
  
• Change brush shape/size and spray size.
  
• Create a simple drawing with the pencil/paint brush in a paint program
  
• Apply principles of effective communication and good design.
  
• Use special effects in multimedia presentations to influence a message.
  
• Create basic animations and other visuals.
  
• Create multimedia documents using a variety of electronic sources.
  
• Create simple slide show presentations (e.g. Hypercard, ClarisWorks).
  
• Incorporate digital graphics into documents (e.g. scanned images).
  
• Understand concepts of communicating using multimedia.
  
• Become conversant with terminology.
  
• Operate basic software.
  
• Navigate a variety of multimedia documents (e.g. Hypercard, Kidpix, HTML).
  
• Access and use a variety of multimedia accessories (e.g. scanner, digital camera).

LESSONS:

1. To begin, you must have students gather information about their favorite author. You could introduce the lesson in a catchy way to make it more interesting for the students:

• Have students pretend they are agents for their favorite author and are creating a presentation to help sell books.

• Students can pretend that they are the president of their favorite author's fan club and are doing a presentation to encourage members to join.

• Students do their presentation to convince others in the class that their favorite author should be selected to come to the class for a visit.

For some possible authors and other ideas for your author study please click here.

2. You may have your own idea of what is required for their presentations or you may decide to have the class decide on the criteria and marking scheme together. Their presentation could include the following:

• Author bibliography (where he/she grew up, where he/she lives now, other interests, other jobs he/she has done, family).
• Has this author received any awards for her/his work?
• A list of other works written by this author.
• Reviews of two of his/her books.
• At least one graphic (saved off of the web or scanned).
• Catchy title page to draw in the reader.
• Bibliography with at least two books and a webliography (web sites used).

3. Students can gather information using books and encyclopedias in the library and using web sites (most authors have a website).

Click here to get to a page of resources for authors and books. (http://sd71.bc.ca/Sd71/Edulinks/langart/index.htm)

4. After students have collected enough information they can begin by organizing their presentation. Have them draw out or write down what they plan to place on each slide.

Click for the blank sheet for this in MSWord or Adobe Acrobat.

Remind them that they need a title page and a bibliography/webliography page.

5. Now in the computer lab students can begin to put together their Hyperstudio or PowerPoint presentations.

Click for instructions on how to use Hyperstudio in presented in MSWord or Adobe Acrobat.

Click here for instructions on how to use PowerPoint.

EVALUATION:

Click here to view a rubric that you can use to mark this project.