The Stillwater Area Schools, which use a tech coaching model as we do, showcased several elementary student projects. Some of my favorites included one in which selected first graders used i Books Author to write a children’s book, illustrate it with scanned-in student art or with photographs, and then record it read aloud by using a Widget to move an audio file into the book. Special Education teachers used a similar format to write short, story-based lessons on social skills, such as Quiet Hands, Sometimes I Get Sad, and Sometimes I Get Mad. Some were illustrated with drawings and some with photos of the targeted student himself using the correct behavior. Another involved collaboration between elementary student authors and high school students enrolled in American Sign Language classes. Young authors wrote text and recorded their stories and illustrations. The finished products were downloaded to i Pads, so anyone in the district could view the elementary students’ images and hear them reading the story aloud as a high school student simultaneously signed the text in ASL.
A fifth grade group interviewed residents at a Retirement Center in order to write their biographies. Three students would team up with each participating resident. The students gathered information about each stage of the senior’s life. They used iMovie and cooperatively compiled and edited the scripts, which were filed in Google Docs, then recorded and edited the sound using Audacity and Captasia. The students shared responsibility for getting permissions, planning the steps and managing the various source files using Google Docs. Each of twenty residents, or (unfortunately) their surviving families, received an iBook biography containing five or six chapters.
Other projects included digital student portfolios, student recorded videos on topics such as Digital Citizenship and Preventing Cyber Bullying, and fifth graders writing graphic novels on the Civil War. Another potentially effective project was fourth grade blogs in which students rotated responsibilities for recapping the week’s learning in each of the subject areas. This might prove to be a good way to review and allow for needed repetition on the previous week’s lessons, as well as writing practice for the bloggers.
I attended a session on Visualization, which emphasized the importance of using visual images during our teaching to be sure students get a good enough picture in their minds to help them grasp content. The most important take-away for me was an introduction to two new NASA websites. One is Eyes on Earth NASA, which would be helpful for teaching earth science topics, and the other is Eyes on the Solar System NASA. We have used other solar system sites from NASA in our third grade unit, but this new one will enrich our study of the solar system by allowing us to look at features such as comets, asteroids, planets and galaxies separately and view celestial bodies from many different perspectives, very interactively.
Janet Henk
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