Picture Book Biographies Inspire and Inform

Here are a few of the finished biography presentations of my fourth grade students. You can read about the project on this blog post, Identifying Personality Traits and Finding Evidence. 

This last step in the process had the students practicing digital literacy and being good digital citizens. 

They practiced presenting information on a slide, finding images that would support that information, citing their sources, ensuring that their message did not get lost in the medium (both substance and style matter). 

They will be presenting their slides to each other this week and practicing their public speaking and presentation skills. Their last task will be to reflect on the process and the project. 

Fifth graders take charge of a tech-infused project

The problem:

A school community growing by leaps and bounds needing a reminder about our community's expected behaviors.

The solution:

Give the fifth graders an opportunity to share what they know about the expected behaviors by creating projects that will be shared with our kindergarten through fourth grade students and their teachers.

The fifth grade teachers and I have been busy planning this valuable, fun, productive, and tech-filled day.

We set the task before them:

They brainstormed expected behaviors:

~Examples of student ideas~

We showed an exemplar that we created:

We reviewed the criteria for success:

Slide 1: Exemplar

Slide 2: Exemplar

Slide 3: Exemplar

We reviewed these two guiding documents:

Full document 

Full document

We sent the off with these two documents, an iPad and a laptop:

The project could be fully completed on the iPads, but I think editing an Animoto and working on a Google Presentation are easier on a laptop,so the students did their planning on the guiding document, photographed and filmed on the iPads, and then started their Animoto on the iPads. After importing their photographs and movies, naming their video, and adding some basic text, the students switched to the laptops. The laptops were numerically aligned with the Animoto accounts for ease of transferring to the new device. 

We are in the thick of it:

We have one more work period tomorrow during which the students will review, edit, and finalize their project. Watching the students think critically and creatively throughout this process has been exciting to watch.  

The hallways were full of students conferring, organizing, and acting out their skits, while back in the classrooms, the students were reviewing what they had just filmed and photographed, assessing it's merit, and heading back out again. #coolbeans

Next steps:

 The students will watch the projects next week and complete a rubric and reflection. We're determining the best time for the projects to be shown to the other students, but I'll be sharing them here soon!

4th Graders Create Digital Postcards for National Monuments

I recently wrote about a project where the fourth graders used Tellagami to create digital postcards for National Monuments. You can read about the project on this blog post: Hi, My Name is...and I am Visiting....

Below are the final projects from two of the fourth grade classes. As I said before, these projects are part of a scaffolded process where the students are learning, understanding, and practicing digital literacy skills. I am excited about their journey and I am happy with these expressions of their new knowledge.

McManama Monument Project from Mason-Rice School on Vimeo.



Page Monument Postcards from Mason-Rice School on Vimeo.