What am I talking about? Well I will fill you in.
All year I have been introducing various websites and apps for my students to use to complete assignments. Now that we are towards the end of the school year, I am reaping the benefits. Some people demonize the use of technology. They say that kids are no longer playing or engaging with others. Although that may be the case in a majority of cases, this is not the case for students that have been guided towards using technology to further their creativity and learning.
We are finishing up a unit on China where we studied China's economy, culture, geography, climate, and government. Students watched movies and wrote notes in Google Docs where they categorized information and compared urban vs. rural life. Previous research units on Crayfish and the USA involved mostly print texts but the China unit involved the new literacies of online reading comprehension. Students were responsible for finding information in a scavenger hunt format utilizing a teacher-made website made years ago, a Livebinder page, a Google custom search engine, open Google searching, and videos.
Next, I asked the class to come up with ways to showcase their understanding of China. They came up with various ideas that included created a movie, newspaper articles, games using Scratch, and an assessment using Google Forms. They formed their own groups and then they were off.I asked them to first organize their ideas using Lucidchart which we connected to our Google Docs.
This is what they came up with so far with Lucidchart...
 |
| Names were removed above. |
I will be posting more as this project evolves, but there is one last thing I want to note here. I looked at my school email today and saw that three students have been using Google apps to do work over Spring Break! In particular JM wrote an email to his classmates and myself. Below is what he said.
