The setting
This project was designed to draw together the QCA documents for History and ICT, in Year 6. The school has 20 laptops with wireless Internet access. These are used in the classroom, with children working in pairs. The Year 6 class is timetabled to access them twice a week.

The following two sites proved especially valuable when researching aspect of life in Ancient Egypt:

British Museum: Ancient Egypt

Guardian's Egypt

ICT objectives
To use multimedia authoring software to organise, refine and present a set of linked pages, which incorporate images, sound and text, in a form that matches the needs of the audience. (QCA Unit 6A)

Summary of lessons
The pupils were asked to create a multimedia presentation using PowerPoint to present aspects of Ancient Egypt, studied in History. Year 6 pupils, in pairs, worked in the classroom on wireless laptops. Nine lessons were devoted to the work. The finished presentations were shown to visitors during an Open Evening.

Pupils were introduced to PowerPoint examples. The potential for multimedia presentation was discussed. The teacher demonstrated web sites relevant to the topic. Pupils were shown how to cut and paste text and pictures from web pages. They created a folder into which they copied graphics and text from their chosen Internet sites.

A storyboard of four slides was created on paper, showing how each slide would look. The slides were then created, using pictures from the folder of Internet graphics. Text was written directly onto the slides. Children were expected to select key facts from the online source.

Pupils were shown how to animate the text and the pictures on the slides. They considered whether they needed to change the order of the slides with the 'slide sorter'. Pupils recorded their own narration onto the slides. They discussed the need to leave the presentation running throughout the evening. They were shown how to adjust speed of slide transition, and make the shows 'loop'. After evaluating their work, they made adjustments to their shows.

Classroom management
Each table is labelled with a number corresponding to the number of a laptop. Once the children have begun work on a project they use the same laptop each session. They can create folders into which they save work, which can then be retrieved at a later stage. This is essential when working on a lengthy project such as this.

Evaluation
Most of the children were already familiar with the laptops, but had not previously made much use of the internet. They had seen some examples of PowerPoint as a result of a visit to a local Secondary school.

Throughout the project the children remained excited and highly motivated. They were very keen to develop their skills and ideas, using the range of techniques available.

As long as they were given step by step guidance, they found PowerPoint a very easy program to use. The professional results obtained were a great incentive, especially for less able children, who had no difficulty in producing presentations as effective as their more able peers. Ideas were often shared as children were interested to know how others had achieved different effects.

The use of the Internet further enhanced the project and the children learned many skills, such as copying and pasting from the Internet, using a search engine and saving web sites.

Without exception, the children enjoyed this project from beginning to end and the remarks made by parents during the open evening added to their self confidence and pleasure.

Factors for success

Problems

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