It has been a busy week, and every spare moment has been devoted to our book publishing. One of the children (as an author) asked if I (as Mildred) had heard back from Gianni yet, and I suddenly remembered I still had their manuscripts in my bag. So I said I hadn't yet, and then wondered what on earth I will do with them. It is the perfect opportunity to say he only liked one, and all work on that one together. But they have worked so hard on their illustrations while they wait, and they really do look good. So I guess I shall have to make Gianni say he would like the whole set, or series, or whatever a bunch of books is called.
We tried scanning and emailing a couple of finished pages to ourselves, then added text in a shape on the computer using pages. This produced a very professional looking page for one book, and it was awesome because we printed it off and I had it as an example to show another group my expectations - as CEO of the company. This particular group had cut out the text roughly, glued it onto A4 sheets of paper and drawn pretty terrible illustrations with felt tip, no background, no colour, no thought as to how it looked, and then stapled the pages together crooked. I told them it was a great draft, they said it was the finished book, I told them it was rubbish. And then I felt mean. But not that mean, because they'd put in no effort at all. Now that they have seen what other groups have produced, they're using hyperstudio to illustrate, and screen capturing each page to print. Two boys from a different group have joined them, and are using their ICT expertise to show them how. Their work looks a million times better.
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| An example of a page, so far! |
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| Using hyperstudio to create illustrations |
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| Check out the kina! |
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| Jacob knows what he is doing, he is a bit of an expert! |
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| Ellie is obviously just having one of those days! |
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| A bit of office gossip going on here! |
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| One of the scanned and emailed illustrations. I need to buy another set of watercolour paints. |
So now I had best create another fake email and get that sorted for tomorrow. It is so nice to see them working together better in groups.
I think it is really important that they see that there are expectations for published work, and especially in this business environment, it is all part of the learning. Great to hear that they are working much better in groups, I guess it does take time, but maybe that is one of the benefits of MOTE perhaps in itself it is a team building activity...:)
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