Parent and Teacher Notes for 'Thart Orainn', an Irish language resource for key stage 2 Geography
Information for Parents and Teachers
Around Us
This is a Geography resource for 7-11 year olds. It promotes understanding of five different aspects of human geography using videos and audio clips. Pupils can then use this content to create their own films and posters.
Studies
In the five focus studies, young people in five different countries present short films that discuss the effects of the following themes on their everyday lives:
| Transport | Western Isles, Scotland |
| Recyling | Northern Ireland |
| Food | England |
| Settlement | Wales |
| Tourism | Mallorca, Spain |
These studies also contain videos that look at these geographical themes in the wider world.
In each study there are 9 - 12 short video clips embedded in an animated landscape. Click on the red signs to watch the videos and on the little pink people to listen to the audio clips. The symbols change colour once the user has watched or listened. A friendly face suggests which video to watch next.
Video Tool
Users can use the Video Tool to create a film by selecting and sequencing video clips, choosing a music soundtrack and writing their own captions.
Poster Creator
The Poster Creator lets users create printable posters or magazine pages. It gives them the chance to choose photographs, write their own text and draw their own pictures.
Saving Work
Users can save work created using the Video Tool and Poster Creator. The work will only be saved on the computer where they are working at the time and it will only be possible to load that piece of work on that particular machine in the future. If users save several large pieces of work on the same computer a dialogue box could appear asking users if they want to allocate more computer memory. Users will have to agree to this before being able to save any more work.
Audio and Visual Help
Users can click on the Preferences button to:
•resize on-screen text and change text and background colours
•hear on-screen text being read out
•make captions available for most video and audio content.
Users can also navigate most content using the keyboard.
