Doodle 4 Google Lesson Plan 1 The South Africa of My Dreams: Imagine In this first of three Doodle 4 Google lesson plans, help your learners explore their own dreams and ideas for a better South Africa. The activities are about finding inspiration from dreamers and doers in South Africa’s recent past, and imagining what the future could be like. Visit the Google 4 Doodle website for all lesson plans and news about the competition.

SA curriculum compliance This lesson plan can be incorporated into the following topics: Grade 4 ●

Life Skills ○ Social responsibility ○ Health and environmental responsibility

Grade 5 ●

Life Skills ○ Social responsibility ○ Health and environmental responsibility

Grade 6 ● ●

Social Sciences: History ○ Democracy and citizenship in South Africa Life Skills ○ Health and environmental responsibility ○ Social responsibility

Activity: It all starts with a little imagination! This year’s Doodle 4 Google competition theme is: “The South Africa of my Dreams”. At Google it has become a tradition to create doodles around the Google homepage logo to celebrate key personalities or moments in history. These Doodles are usually created by a Google team of artists. But as we celebrate 20 Years of Freedom in South Africa, Google is calling on school children to create a Google Doodle imagining their future for South Africa. So let’s start with a little imagination!

                                                              

 

Brainstorming is a key part of this stage in the creative process. In fact, brainstorming remains one of the most effective creative thinking techniques in use today. The primary cornerstone to brainstorming is the absence of judgment or criticism. All ideas, no matter how nontraditional, have the right to exist at this stage. This is particularly valuable for those learners who lack the confidence to publicly share their ideas. A comfortable, collaborative environment can help to inspire learners during the “imagine” phase. Invite learners to sit in groups instead of by themselves, outdoors rather than inside the school, or listening to music instead of working in silence.

Build on it In this activity, learners read a variety of news headlines and articles related to South Africa and change some negative headlines to reflect something good or positive. They brainstorm ideas about what it is like in the South Africa of their dreams, using brainwriting. They then choose one idea as a focus for their Google Doodle.

Strategy This activity uses brainwriting as a brainstorming strategy, using a collaborative tool such as Google Drive. Each learner works on a brainwriting document to write their ideas about “The South Africa of My Dreams”, using a template. The learners are given 1 minute to write as many ideas as they can, one in each category block. When time is up, they work on a document that is owned by another learner in the group. They then read the ideas in the document and use them to spark more ideas of their own. After a minute, they work on another document. This continues until everyone in the group has worked on each other’s document. This is an excellent way of ensuring that every learner contributes ideas, especially those who are shy about voicing their ideas.

You Will Need: ●

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Access to the Internet. Some of the tools we will use include the following: ○ Google Drive - this is like Word or Powerpoint but hosted on the Web. Creating a Google Doc or Slide allows you to easily collaborate and re-share. If you’re using Google Apps for Education, you may already be familiar with this tool. But you can also use it by logging into your Gmail account and clicking on Drive. We recommend each learner does this - or at least one per team. ○ News websites such as Google News, News24, Eyewitness News, eNCA and Mail & Guardian A laptop/PC/tablet per group of learners. If you don’t have access to the Internet, provide each pair of learners with a South African newspaper with a variety of positive and negative headlines of the day, such as: Fury over unpaid school fees, Security needed at train stations, City pledges to upgrade homes, Flood outrage in Soweto, School undergoes a positive transformation, More homes burn down, Robbers strike again, Community organisation helps refugees, South African sports team victory.

                                                              

 

Teaching Guidelines 1. Introduce learners to the Google doodle and explain that a doodle uses the Google logo to celebrate holidays, anniversaries and the lives of famous artists, pioneers and scientists. Each new design reflects the innovation for which Google is known. Access the doodle archive, which will show you some examples of Google doodles that have been created in the past.

Doodles are the fun, surprising changes that are made to the Google logo to celebrate holidays, anniversaries, and the lives of famous artists, pioneers, and scientists.

2. Write this year’s Doodle 4 Google theme on the board and tell learners that they will have an opportunity to create their own doodles. Information and previous entries can be viewed here. The theme of the competition is “The South Africa of My Dreams” and learners must create a Google doodle that fits with this theme. 3. Explain to learners that they will first read through and choose some news headlines in order to give them some ideas about the issues in our country and how to possibly improve on them. 4. Let pairs of learners read news headlines online (see the links above). Ask the learners to each choose three news headlines that they think shows something positive about South Africa, and three news headlines that they think shows something negative about South Africa. 5. For each heading that they think is negative, they must rewrite the headline to make it into a headline that shows something positive about South Africa. 6. Let two or three pairs of learners join together to form a group. Give the learners about 10 minutes to discuss their headlines in the group. Ask each group to decide on two good headlines to share with the class. 7. Explain that the class is now going to do a brainwriting exercise to come up with a list of ideas that can possibly be used for a Doodle.

                                                              

 

8. Divide the learners into groups of eight. Learners should have access to, and create their own Google Slide in Google Drive. (You can also create a Google Doc, but we recommend slides as it has more visual layout with many drawing tools to use). 9. Show them a table like the one below so that they can start thinking about how to create their presentation. In the example below, the left-hand row shows some categories. Learners should think of categories on their own. Encourage the learners to be creative and to consider issues that they are interested in and can relate to. They should also be encouraged to format their presentation or mind map in a way that suits them. If learners are stuck, they can use some or all of the example categories below. In the South Africa of my dreams …

Should do this...

Should not feel this...

People Children Communities Animals Environment Other

10. Ask the learners to give their team mates access to their Google Slide. Explain to the learners that you will give them 1 minute to type, in their own presentation, as many ideas as they can about what life is like in the “South Africa of My Dreams” for any of their categories. 11. Explain that the learners can write their ideas for any of the categories. The categories are provided as prompts to help them along, as learners may feel stuck without them. Explain that they do not need to write an idea in each category. They can write in any category as long as there is an empty block. Also explain that they can use the category “Other” if their ideas do not relate to any of the categories listed. 12. After a minute, which you time, the learners then work on another team mate’s document. The learner then reads the ideas already in the presentation, and adds his or her own ideas in the empty blocks. 13. Learners cannot repeat ideas. If they get stuck, ask them to think of the news headlines they read or heard to help trigger ideas. Learners must start working on a different presentation after every minute so that every learner gets a chance to contribute ideas and build on others’ ideas. At the end, each learner gets back his or her original page.

                                                              

 

14. Give the learners enough time to read through all the ideas in their presentations. Ask some learners to share with the rest of the class the three ideas that they like best. 15. Ask the learners to think about the ideas they read or have heard and to choose one idea that, for them, represents the South Africa of their dreams. By adding a new slide to their Google Presentation, learners should then create a mindmap to further explore their chosen idea. They will use this mind map to begin thinking about the idea for their Doodle design.

You can easily create a collaborative mind map using Google Presentations.

16. If there is enough time, learners can also do image searches using the Google Image Search tool to make their mind maps more visual, and to inspire their designs. They could also take their own photos after school or on the weekend with a tablet or smartphone to include in their mind maps. The idea here is to allow learners to create a ‘vision board’ of their ideas using any media that they want to.

By searching for terms such as “South Africa nature” Google Image Search can help generate images for a vision board.

                                                              

 

17. To make sure that learners do not come across any inappropriate images while on Google Image Search, turn on SafeSearch: click Search Settings. Select the tick box to filter explicit results. (Learn more about making the web safe for children at www.google.co.za/safetycenter).

Take It Digital! More information about the apps in this lesson plan ● ● ●

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Google for Education is a collection of Google tools and products that make learning fun, productive and collaborative. Google Drive brings your documents to life with smart editing and styling tools to help you easily format text and paragraphs. Bubbl.us is a simple and free web application that lets students brainstorm online by creating mind maps. To view examples, learn how to use bubbl.us or simply start brainstorming, go to their website. Popplet: Used as a mind-map, Popplet helps students think and learn visually. Students can capture facts, thoughts, and images and learn to create relationships between them. For a tutorial on Popplet, watch this video. SyncSpace is a collaborative whiteboard app available for tablets. Students can use SyncSpace to create drawings and documents on tablets. They can create using free-hand drawing tools, using typing tools, or a combination of the two tool sets. Drawings and documents can be sent to and synced with other users so that they can comment and edit.