This year I teach a Digital Media module to Transition Year students, I designed this module by asking Transition Year students, when they were still in 3rd year, what type of digital competencies they would like to have by the end of TY. In my school, coding is on the Junior Cycle curriculum so students wished for a break from this and to work more on regular Office programs, video and sound editing, animation etc.
So far students are really positive about the module and enjoy learning to be more effective users of common programs such as Word. We take a thematic approach each week and design a task based on this. For example, I ask students to imagine they are working for a publisher; they must submit a well-presented article with suitably licensed images by the end of the week. I then share some criteria for what a ‘well-presented’ article might look like. In addition, I try to include some keyboard shortcuts in lessons such as ctrl + f for find and ctrl + h for find and replace.
At the end of the week I will ask students to pick one or two of the most useful functions they learned in the week. Text wrapping for images won a unanimous victory in week 1 and learning to search for and use suitably licensed images! For some well stocked image libraries which are copyright free try the websites below:
- https://pixabay.com/
- http://www.photosforclass.com/
- https://www.pexels.com/
- https://unsplash.com/
- https://stocksnap.io/
- https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/stock-up
The school is planning to run a fashion show event in the coming months. Students were tasked with designing a tri-fold brochure to advertise the event. This lesson worked well and students learned about using templates and searching Office’s online template library. They had never considered using templates before and now feel that having a suitable template for a task can be a great start to a polished document.
Recently our computer room was upgraded to Windows 10 which has Paint 3D already installed. I am very much a beginner with using this application but myself and my students had lots of fun making 3D characters and considering how we will later use these in PowerPoint and Word documents. Word and PowerPoint have amazing new functionality allowing users to insert 3D images – this brings the wow-factor for sure. You can learn more about 3D Paint and using 3D images in Office using the links below.
Fore more information on Paint 3D see https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4014938/windows-10-basic-3d-modeling
Please note: 3D Modelling in Word and PowerPoint is only available to Office 365 subscribers at the moment.