OPP Kids Project

As a culminating task for their participation in the OPP kids program the students were given a choice of how to share their learning.  The question they were asked was "What does OPP Kids offer/teach kids?"  Students were able to choose how they wanted to present this information to their peers.  Some chose a poster, while some chose to do a presentation in Google Drive.  More than half of the students chose to do the poster.  However, the most detailed and successful projects were done a device.   The exciting part was watching students who would normally struggle present their information to the class with a project that they could be proud of.  When students were asked why they chose the poster over the device the most common response was that the poster allowed them to be more creative with their ideas. But overall the students who did the poster missed some of the important details and ideas.

Student Inquiry Ipad vs. Mini Laptop

We have been using the I-pads and mini laptops in our classroom with student inquiry.  My project has been focused on giving students freedom of choice when it comes to using a device to complete their inquiry projects.  I have been tracking which device they prefer and the reason for that choice.  Students prefer the I-pads because they don't have to log on and wait for the device to load up, like the mini laptops.  The students that are proficient in typing seem to be the students that choose the computers.  Students are generating their own questions to guide their learning and having many devices in the classroom allows them to follow through on their inquiry and makes it easier to offer opportunities for inquiry based learning.

Invasive Species Trailer

In groups students created an iMovie trailer on an invasive species to Canada (idea from Bill Thompson at ITT meeting 2012-2013).  Students researched specific questions on their species and then created the trailer to clearly summarize their findings.  They watched the trailers that they created in the Fall on their narrative stories.  They deconstructed these trailers, looking for what was effective and ineffective in a trailer.  They used this information to make their science trailers more specific and detailed.  Another strategy to bump up their work was using the initial questions from their research and having the students find evidence in the trailer of where they answered these questions in their final product.  This is when the best revising and editing happened in our classroom.

Explain Everything for Droid!!!

One of my students was interested in working on his Explain Everything project at home but does not have an apple product at home.  He did a little research and discovered that...

Explain Everything is not available for Droid products!!!!

I haven't has a chance to test it out but I definitely will.  If it works, it will make the program less exclusive;  more accessible at home.

Remote assignment submission

Had a neat thing happen last week. A student was away from school for an extended period of time and was quite anxious about having missed so much work in school. He has been dealing with anxiety, which was only getting worse as time passed away from my vocal music class. I sent his father home with one of our iPads so his son could perform the vocal solos he had missed, then send it to me for evaluation on Google Drive.

Due to much time missed because of mental health issues, there was even some question as to whether this student might complete this credit. The option to complete and submit work remotely from home may turn out to be the difference between success and failure in my vocal music course.

Assessing Learning Skills and Work Habits

Honestly 'marking' and evaluating the work habits and learning skills can be difficult to do properly at the secondary level (I have no idea what it is like at the elementary level, but this might be true there too). While doing a course recently, I had to do something about assessment through technology. So I had an idea, assess the learning skills and work habits!

Its just an idea, but I have included the rubric that I made for the assignment if it gives you ideas for making your own tool for this or just use the one here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B56ahhzE5dr7WHYzTXJVODctcFU/edit?usp=sharing

Comic Maker--a great story-building app!

I have recently been playing around with a free app called "Comic Maker".  It is great in a language class for the purpose of providing students with the option of "writing" a story through the creation of a comic, rather than through traditional paragraph writing. (The creation of a digital comic could either be used as an option for differentiated instruction or as an assigned task for all).  The app allows you to select any number of pages with an assortment of layouts of frames and to choose from an assortment of settings, characters, text boxes, colours, symbols, objects, etc. and to insert them into your comic.  It is a great hands-on, colourful and creative alternative to having students simply hand write, hand draw or type out a traditional story!  As my students are starting to use the app they are finding it easy to use and engaging  and I am getting better quality work from some students who normally would not excel at story-writing. :)