Sunday, June 9, 2013

"It was hard, but fun."

For our current unit about ecosystems and rice, I had the students make a presentation using Google Slides that we will print and put together as a book.

I made the slides for the students. I put the titles on them and asked them to find a picture for each one. I then showed the students my example book that I made, with the same slides as they had, and I showed them how to locate legal images through Google Slides and showed how to cite their sources.




Most students caught on quickly to this. One of the hardest parts for them, which is hard for any new user to Google Slides, is the way the invisible boxes work. Many of them got stuck when they tried to select their text, but an invisible text box was covering it up and they could not do anything.

The next step for them was to add text. This unit I used some paper books I got from Scholastic and the idea was to use that as a guide.

Of course there were some students who got stuck with this too. Before we started I put the students into teams to help each other, but some students got so focused on what they were doing, it was hard to pull themselves away. So for those who needed the help, I gave them some cloze sentences.

This book is from one first grader who erased all the slides I made. After he finished I saw that not all the citations made it to the slides.





When I asked the students after they had printed their books if they liked doing this, they said they did, and one student said, "It was hard, but fun."

Another student taught me that you can adjust the transparency of the color of the text box. That was a lot better than the way I was doing it [and the way I showed them]. I had told them to I can learn too you know.

Break it down
While I saw a lot of good tech and design learning happening (not to mention great peer mentoring), it took several class periods to finish. This was at a time when many were being taken with school functions. It got me thinking about what I should have done.

I could have broke this down more for them. Instead of saying, "Here we go, do this", I could have done one slide a week in the unit.

Week 1 - cover page and a breakdown of the central idea
Week 2 - slide/page on plant parts
Week 3 - page about the plant life cycle
Week 4 - page about animal life cycle
Week 5 - page about rice field food web
Week 6 - page about how rice gets from field to table

I imagine the book being the assessment of what we learned. If we worked on it midweek, I could also use it as a formative assessment.

Could the summative assessment be ongoing like this?

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