Our first week back to school was the perfect opportunity to create a fun activity on perspective. The fourth grade went on a photo scavenger hunt created by the fourth grade. Students were grouped together and given two or three digital cameras per group with the mission of finding interesting objects around the school and photographing them. However, finding pictures of school objects would have been too easy for our savvy students, so instead the photos were extreme close-ups, further challenging their peers to identify what was in the photo. Once the students had their photos, they switched cameras with another group and the hunt was on to find what was in the picture.
In the process of the activity, our fourth graders learned how to use the digital cameras, including how to adjust for telephoto shots, how to adjust the flash and how to capture the image at the right distance for a clear shot. Students also had to look at common objects more closely, both taking the photos and finding the pictures. As students sought out the photos of their peers the discussions became intense about how things looked different in photos, for example how lighting can change the color of objects and what key features could they use to identify a match. One group attempted to take the same picture to insure they had the right objects.
After both groups had a chance to search out the items we regrouped to share our guesses and learn what was actually in the picture. Some of the photos were stumpers, but many were identified. Everyone enjoyed looking at the world a little differently.
What I like most about this activity is there are so many different concepts this process can support. We could have discussed how things appear different depending on how we view them, we could have discussed why students chose certain objects, how to best take pictures, design, how to problem solve. The scavenger hunt could have had more parameters such as objects that personify AFS, or fourth grade, or Lower School, or one of the Quaker testimonies. The pictures could have been clues to a larger puzzle. This activity is flexible and could be used across many grade levels. Kudos to our fourth grade team for developing the scavenger hunt. And thanks for inviting me to participate.
Here are just a few of the pictures taken by the fourth grade:
Monday, September 13, 2010
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Seventh Grade Math
Seventh grade is creating PowerPoint. Okay, maybe not big news these days that a seventh grader is putting together a PowerPoint and let’s face it, the trend is to move away from PowerPoint in our technology classrooms. However, it is the way our students are using the medium, not just that they are PowerPoint experts. (And most are by the way.)
So what’s the deal? The deal is that our students each took one math concept and had to find a way to teach the concept using one slide and animations. How would they organize their information? What is important to know when we add integers for example? Do we need examples? The students took up the challenge with great gusto, eager to show off their animation skills. We spent a total of two class periods giving the students time to create their masterpieces. Then they were pulled together as three separate PowerPoint, one for each section.
Now comes the best part. The PowerPoint was uploaded to the seventh grade math wiki, and each class had the opportunity to evaluate a peer’s slide. The criteria for the evaluation included:
1. Is the math clear and accurate, if not what would need to be done to correct the math?
2. Are the animations an enhancement to the slide or do they detract from the learning? If you feel the animations need to be modified explain how.
3. Are there any copyright issues? Are the images, words, etc. created by the author, or if images are they from the clipart database? Read carefully, is the slide in the author’s own words?
4. Based on the above criteria do you think the slide is ready to share with another school and then finally publish to the world in its present form?
The students are using the wiki to post their evaluations of the individual slides. Some sample evaluations:
“The math was done correctly but not very interesting or clear. It had no animations, which made it, as I said before, too boring. There were no copyright issues because nothing was taken from other site. I don't think this slide show is ready to share with other schools. It is too hard to read with the combination of black background and rainbow writing.”
“This slide was simple yet descriptive, but many of the examples were incorrect. For example -10-(-4) is not 14, it is -6. Also, some of the writing was unclear on slide 12." Just draw a number line if it helps you more. Also when you have a subtraction sign next to a parenthesis. You change the sign to addition and the negative number to a positive.” This was unclear to me because there was no example of a number line, and there should be a comma after "parenthesis" and "Y" shouldn't be capitalized.
There were no copyright issues, and I really liked your animations. I think you need to edit your examples before publishing.”
“1. The math is accurate, but there is one part I don't understand. It just suddenly went into another equation (-8+2=-6), and then it said that the answer to this problem was positive. Otherwise, the math was clear.
2. The animations were really great. They didn't take away from the slide, and they made it more interesting. Good job!
3. There are no copyright issues. Everything seems to be in the author's words-except for maybe the vocabulary. Also, it's not 'Oppisite', it's opposite.
4. I think that a little more editing would be helpful (see above), but I think that it will be very good once it's edited.”
As you can see the students took their evaluations of the slides seriously, and worked hard to give direction to their peers. As we continue to through this with the other two sections, it will be exciting to see how the students rework their original ideas based on peer feedback.
Why Do This?
From a twenty-first century learning perspective, this project encapsulates much of what we are trying to prepare our children to do. They needed to first understand the basic material to both make the slides and evaluate the work of a peer. The evaluation and critical thought process had to be focused on not only was the math correct but was it presented in a way that helped explain the concept. Finally, the students had to be able to offer suggestions on improvement. And they had to do all of this in a way that was sensitive to the fact that there is a human who created the work.
Additionally, Wayne, our math teacher, loved the opportunity for the students to write using the math language. Creating and evaluating the project gave the students authentic purpose for math discussions.
This is only the beginning for I see many good learning opportunities coming from our ability to present information in an easy to use format. I have added a link to the an example on authorStream. Enjoy.
Math 1
So what’s the deal? The deal is that our students each took one math concept and had to find a way to teach the concept using one slide and animations. How would they organize their information? What is important to know when we add integers for example? Do we need examples? The students took up the challenge with great gusto, eager to show off their animation skills. We spent a total of two class periods giving the students time to create their masterpieces. Then they were pulled together as three separate PowerPoint, one for each section.
Now comes the best part. The PowerPoint was uploaded to the seventh grade math wiki, and each class had the opportunity to evaluate a peer’s slide. The criteria for the evaluation included:
1. Is the math clear and accurate, if not what would need to be done to correct the math?
2. Are the animations an enhancement to the slide or do they detract from the learning? If you feel the animations need to be modified explain how.
3. Are there any copyright issues? Are the images, words, etc. created by the author, or if images are they from the clipart database? Read carefully, is the slide in the author’s own words?
4. Based on the above criteria do you think the slide is ready to share with another school and then finally publish to the world in its present form?
The students are using the wiki to post their evaluations of the individual slides. Some sample evaluations:
“The math was done correctly but not very interesting or clear. It had no animations, which made it, as I said before, too boring. There were no copyright issues because nothing was taken from other site. I don't think this slide show is ready to share with other schools. It is too hard to read with the combination of black background and rainbow writing.”
“This slide was simple yet descriptive, but many of the examples were incorrect. For example -10-(-4) is not 14, it is -6. Also, some of the writing was unclear on slide 12." Just draw a number line if it helps you more. Also when you have a subtraction sign next to a parenthesis. You change the sign to addition and the negative number to a positive.” This was unclear to me because there was no example of a number line, and there should be a comma after "parenthesis" and "Y" shouldn't be capitalized.
There were no copyright issues, and I really liked your animations. I think you need to edit your examples before publishing.”
“1. The math is accurate, but there is one part I don't understand. It just suddenly went into another equation (-8+2=-6), and then it said that the answer to this problem was positive. Otherwise, the math was clear.
2. The animations were really great. They didn't take away from the slide, and they made it more interesting. Good job!
3. There are no copyright issues. Everything seems to be in the author's words-except for maybe the vocabulary. Also, it's not 'Oppisite', it's opposite.
4. I think that a little more editing would be helpful (see above), but I think that it will be very good once it's edited.”
As you can see the students took their evaluations of the slides seriously, and worked hard to give direction to their peers. As we continue to through this with the other two sections, it will be exciting to see how the students rework their original ideas based on peer feedback.
Why Do This?
From a twenty-first century learning perspective, this project encapsulates much of what we are trying to prepare our children to do. They needed to first understand the basic material to both make the slides and evaluate the work of a peer. The evaluation and critical thought process had to be focused on not only was the math correct but was it presented in a way that helped explain the concept. Finally, the students had to be able to offer suggestions on improvement. And they had to do all of this in a way that was sensitive to the fact that there is a human who created the work.
Additionally, Wayne, our math teacher, loved the opportunity for the students to write using the math language. Creating and evaluating the project gave the students authentic purpose for math discussions.
This is only the beginning for I see many good learning opportunities coming from our ability to present information in an easy to use format. I have added a link to the an example on authorStream. Enjoy.
Math 1
Monday, April 19, 2010
Exploring the Internet
Second grade is moving on to the pioneers an Oregon Trail. As they study heading west in the 1800's, we also begin to explore using the Internet to independently research information about the pioneers. Starting with what the Internet is and how to keep ourselves safe, we realized that what is true in the physical world is also true in the digital realm as well. Between both classes we were able to come up with four guidelines for staying safe on the Internet:
1. Tell our parents when we are going on to the Internet.
2. Stick with people and places we know, check with parents or teachers before checking out an unknown site.
3. If we stumble across something inappropriate, we will let a teacher or parent know.
4. Treat others the way we want to be treated.
Here is a great resource for kids on Internet safety provided by PBS.
Once we had our guidelines down we were able to focus on good search techniques. We started by identifying some of the different parts of a browser including the address bar and search engine. We then discussed how to start a search. We choose to use pioneers as our search term. We then began reading through some of the sites that the term found for us. By reading through the information we were able to find a site on pioneers that would give us good information.
After some discussion about .coms, .nets, .orgs, .edus and .govs we were ready to explore the site we found. One of the first things we noticed is that not all sites, although they may contain great information are written on a second grade reading level. As the class continued and students broke up into groups, this became a larger problem. Each group was give a topic and was tasked with finding a site that provided information. The challenge was increased because the students were not allowed to use the site we had found together, Thinkquest.
As a class, we discovered the need to sometimes change our search terms, as well as how many sites we may have to sift through before finding one that provided good information. We also touched on how to separate out reliable sites.
This is the beginning of a long journey for our second graders. As they grow throughout the years, they will continually work on refining their research skills. However, it is always very exciting to be a part of the beginning of something, and I was super excited to watch our second graders begin to take on this research and claim ownership over their learning.
1. Tell our parents when we are going on to the Internet.
2. Stick with people and places we know, check with parents or teachers before checking out an unknown site.
3. If we stumble across something inappropriate, we will let a teacher or parent know.
4. Treat others the way we want to be treated.
Here is a great resource for kids on Internet safety provided by PBS.
Once we had our guidelines down we were able to focus on good search techniques. We started by identifying some of the different parts of a browser including the address bar and search engine. We then discussed how to start a search. We choose to use pioneers as our search term. We then began reading through some of the sites that the term found for us. By reading through the information we were able to find a site on pioneers that would give us good information.
After some discussion about .coms, .nets, .orgs, .edus and .govs we were ready to explore the site we found. One of the first things we noticed is that not all sites, although they may contain great information are written on a second grade reading level. As the class continued and students broke up into groups, this became a larger problem. Each group was give a topic and was tasked with finding a site that provided information. The challenge was increased because the students were not allowed to use the site we had found together, Thinkquest.
As a class, we discovered the need to sometimes change our search terms, as well as how many sites we may have to sift through before finding one that provided good information. We also touched on how to separate out reliable sites.
This is the beginning of a long journey for our second graders. As they grow throughout the years, they will continually work on refining their research skills. However, it is always very exciting to be a part of the beginning of something, and I was super excited to watch our second graders begin to take on this research and claim ownership over their learning.
Friday, March 5, 2010
The World Of Scratch in Second Grade
It's that time of year again. Some people think Spring, but I know that it is actually a great time to introduce Scratch. Scratch, as some of you may already know, is a program developed by MIT to help children learn the basics of computer programming. While exploring animation through the use of blocks, children use creativity, problem solving and each other to make their visions come to life. Scratch also offers wonderful opportunities to learn co-ordnates on a graph, the use of variables, speed and timing, audio recording, integers, the list goes on. If you haven't had the opportunity to explore this program, I invite you to download it for free at home.
We start with having children animate the letters of their name. This gives the students a chance to become familiar with the environment. We then move on to animating lunes, short poems the second graders create with Catalina.
Below is a sampling of some of the animations created in our class. I've mixed in no particular order the name project and the lune project. Due to limited space not all projects are posted.
We start with having children animate the letters of their name. This gives the students a chance to become familiar with the environment. We then move on to animating lunes, short poems the second graders create with Catalina.
Below is a sampling of some of the animations created in our class. I've mixed in no particular order the name project and the lune project. Due to limited space not all projects are posted.
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