Practice with OpenOffice.org Drawing Tools
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OpenOffice.org Draw
Skill Development Activities for the ButterBox Project
To the Teacher
The activities in this set of slides are intended to help students discover the tools and develop the skills they will need for doing the final ButterBox project.
These activities are intended to challenge students who are expected to be exploratory learners in the classroom. The instructions do NOT give step-by-step methods. Instead, the instructions present a sequence of increasingly complicated tasks to be solved by each individual student. In my computer lab classroom, I walked the room with a seating chart used as a checklist to mark when each student had completed the tasks. In classes where two students shared a computer, I needed to be vigilant to ensure that each student did the work. The initial skills are very simple, so I asked that the students complete them in clusters to give me a chance to get them checked off. Students needed to raise a hand to indicate that they were finished with the activity cluster.
The practice activities took up to a week. Some students, especially when not sharing a computer, were able to complete the warmup activities sooner, and had more time to complete the actual ButterBox project itself. I routinely answered and demonstrated as issues arose to make the learning process interactive and not “lecture style” and encouraged students to show others what they had found or learned from me.
You will need to use this activity with your own style, so feel free to modify these activities to suit your style and the age group of the students. My students were in grades 7 and 8. Eliminate warmups based on your own experience. Make your own Drawing file of activities more suitable to your students' expected ability level. I strongly recommend that you do each of the practice activities yourself so you are comfortable with the effort and time it takes you to complete each one and adjust accordingly.
Background and Credits
The project was originally done in the junior high computer skills classes of Algot Runeman at King Philip Regional School District in Norfolk, Massachusetts. They were done using ClarisWorks on Apple Macintosh computers, but the project has been redone here with OpenOffice.org, the free, open source (FOSS) program. The project is a curriculum/lesson plan of “Moving to Open Source Software in Schools” (MOSSSIG), a special interest group of the Massachusetts Computer Using Educators (MassCUE ). The project is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License which gives you the flexibility to modify it to suit your needs, and to pass your modifications along (and back to us, too, please) as long as you acknowledge the origin of the project in your version. For example, you might want to do a conversion for use with a different drawing program such as the one in Microsoft Office or a dedicated drawing tool of your choice.
MOSSSIG http://mosssig.wordpress.com
MassCUE http://www.masscue.org
Algot Runeman http://www.runeman.org
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Optionally delete this slide from the file you use for your students.