Before our half term holiday, Year 8 History students have been working on 18th Century changes in France. Students were asked to produce short comic – like summaries of the key issues. Students really enjoy working with this application and as well as getting to grips with key issues of the time, they have fun making the summaries more personal.

Year 7 took a short break from spreadsheets on Monday in order to produce work on Halloween. Students used Comic Life to produce some very informative, colourful and lively posters which were just a little bit scary!

Students have created some initial basic projects – but do return to see what others they make in the next couple of weeks. Click on the images to see the projects.

Here are four of some of the excellent fake walls students produced. Click on the images to be taken to the fake walls.

My Face your Manga Avatar

Year 7 have just begun creating blogs in class. Before they created blogs, it was important that they planned and prepared what they were going to write about.

For this section of work, the blog title would be, ‘My Christmas gifts.’ As a start, it was probably a good idea to write out a list of the items they had received and another for those which they had given to friends or family.

This link to a teacher’s Christmas list  gave an example of what their blog post title and first entry should cover.

They had to include:

a) The Title of the Post (as given above). b) A sub-heading for each item on the list. c) A description of every item on the list. d) The BEST price for each item. (Researched from various online shops.) e) An image for every item. They needed to ensure that the image was clear, cropped correctly and not pixilated.

Once the preparation was done, students signed up for a blog, created an avatar from the Face your Manga website and added several widgets to their side bars. Then they started preparing to upload images and text to their blogs.

Harry C's blog	Jassi G's blog
Will B's blog	Aran K's blog

1. Use the Richard III Guilty/Not Guilty check sheet which we worked on in class as a reference for your animation.

2. Do not attempt to use all of the points from the list in your animation. Some prove that he was possibly not guilty of the murder, others prove neither. Use only those which indicate Richard’s guilt in the murder of the Princes.

3. You will only have one lesson and one homework to complete the animation, so take care not to go into too much detail. Pace yourself during the lesson.

4. Above all – enjoy it!

Here are a few of the animations which the students produced.

Joseph S	Ben R
Annanay K	Michael P

At the end of last term we decided that as Year 8′s were completing their work on the Princes in the Tower  – and are about to begin a section on Henry VIII, (well known for his rather portly appearance due to his love of excess) we’d put together a menu for a Tudor Christmas feast. We chose to do this in Mixbook - a very useful digital storytelling application. In order to remember how to login to Mixbook at a later stage, students created a new Word document and added the name of the web 2.0 application, as well as the Usernames and Passwords which they had created. Read how other teachers have used Mixbook

Once the Mixbooks were complete, students pasted the URL into a Google document. What do you think of some of the Year 8 efforts thus far? Click on the images to be taken to the Tudor Menus.

1. Acceptable behaviour in communicating online, being careful online, (via any medium including social networks and chat) the passing out of personal details and arrangments regarding meeting up of new online friends. They also answered a questionnaire from the ThinkUKnow website regarding their online habits.

2. Cyber bullying: Including aspects of harassment, bullying, stalking, and any other type of abuse.

The boys were then asked to design a poster using Glogster to consolidate their learning. Glogster’s are very easy to embed and we will shortly do so, in order for these Glogster poster images to be seen in full.