Hamish and Creative Writing

Post date: Sep 05, 2015 3:12:21 PM

We started the session by logging them on with their dedicated Highland Google Apps accounts. A Google Doc was shared with them, first things first was to play around on the Google Doc, they loved seeing each other in the doc and on the big screen. They firstly played around with changing fonts, colour and size. Having the opportunity to completely run riot in the doc was important, within minutes they had mastered it and enjoyed it! They were shown how to find the docs and slides app icon on the browser.

Creative Writing

They then opened up a new doc we had created for them called 'Hamish and the Beanstalk'. The doc just had one sentence on a single page and a table with their names in and a box to type their creative writing. It began, 'Once upon a time there was a boy called Hamish'. The pupils then created their own text, elaborating as much as they liked. The story continued and the pupils built up there own versions. We then created a collaborative Google slide set and the pupils cut and paste their texts onto each slide to show their very own rewritten story. They then presented their slide to the rest of the class, followed by cheery applause. Here's Cheryl's new story of 'Hamish and the Beanstalk'.

This happened over an afternoon session after a morning of CPD with school staff. The session with the pupils that took very little prior preparation has created a great project that can now be used as a basis for lots of other activities. Since then, we've noticed the pupils have continued to write in the doc as homework at home, completely unprompted.

Lynne McLuckie the Head Teacher said,

'What a fantastic day we have had. All the eleven children in the school took part in a session where they learned all about their Google chrome accounts and also took part in a creative writing collaboration. I haven’t seen the children so enthused about writing in a long time. Not only did they create stories, they read and recorded themselves reading, one or two pupils took a video of this, uploaded it and shared it with the group. Even the wee P2 girl found a picture for the front cover of the presentation and sent it to the group for the opening slide' I know that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that there is so much more both teachers and pupils can accomplish with this technology on our side.