Monday 22nd June  #ForestFlight

Our final meeting of the year was inspired by birds and flight. Teachers, students and pupils came together for this event.

We began by deconstructing electronic devices such as old laptops, phones, videos and DVD players using pliers, screwdrivers and hammers! The children’s curiosity was engaged by having the opportunity to look inside these familiar devices. Helen has made this set of slides to help us learn more about the insides of the devices we were looking at.

Art Specialist students helped us to deconstruct technology.

We used what we found inside the equipment to construct birds or to attach to cardboard birds. It was a challenge to choose and join the parts into birds that could stand up but there were plenty of adults around to help.

After the birds were constructed we used the app MadPad  compose and record a ‘song’ for our birds. As a finale we looked at each bird and listened to the songs and later, we attached this to each bird using a QR code.

Here is a video of all the birdsong being played at the same time:

You can see many of the ideas and inspiration for this event here on our Padlet.

This  idea was inspired by the AccessArt Share-a-Bird project – you can read more about it here and maybe sign up to take part. Birds made of recycled phones were also featured in the Digital Revolution exhibition:

We have also made a Pinterest boardwith some ideas for making 2d and 3d birds from card, folded paper, wire and other materials:

We have been taking tech apart and annotating with Skitch:

We were intrigued by these Lego birds from Thomas Poulsom:

We’ll be using the app MadPad HD to remix sounds and compose birdsongs. Here is an excellent collection of ideas for exploring creativity and sound with iPads from Katie Wardrobe using the apps MadPad  along with QR codes.

We have some ideas about continuing this project after the event by allowing the our flock to migrate around schools…