Opening Staff Meeting - Sharing Our Learning from CJPTTF

In preparation for our first staff meeting of the year, our Director of Lifelong Learning, Marilyn Stern, asked Jennie and me to prepare a segment on how other teachers might benefit from what we had learned through our fellowship.  Jennie and I chose to introduce some of the tools we had found as fun and useful ways to share content.

We set the context of technology in the classroom through segments of the Youth Portrait of Cameron video and an explanation of what it means to work in the cloud, including some of the basic information needed to use the netbooks given to us from CJP and our newly purchased Chromebooks.  Jennie demonstrated Media Midrash http://mediamidrash.behrmanhouse.com/, Quizlet http://quizlet.com/, Vokis http://www.voki.com/, Diigo and Diigolet https://www.diigo.com/.  Sandy introduced Time Toast http://www.timetoast.com/,   Tagxedo http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html and shared the Common Craft video created on the video camera during one of our Fellowship sessions.  Several staff subsequently met with one of us to learn how to access and use the new equipment and/or use resources from the list we provided at this opening staff meeting.

Follow this link to the resource list we compiled and shared with our staff:      Technology Research and Tools                                     

4.  

The Family Tree of Abraham and His Future Family

The 4th graders are off and running, actually walking, in their search for the familial relationships found in Bereshit, the Book of Genesis.  Students have been divided into teams of four or five members to work collaboratively.  Each team will design, develop and produce a Family Tree of Abraham and His Future Family including the generations of Abram and Sarai through Jacob and Esau.  Some teams are finding a good balance of individual contributions and shared responsibility.  Some teams are struggling to develop a strong collaborative work style, learning to support each other in their individual strengths and personal challenges.  It is hard to always be patient!

In the next implementation of this unit, I will devote more time up front walking the students through the development of the Glossary.  The class will be guided through the Introduction, the Task and the first few searches in the Process.  Once I am confident that they grasp the concept of academic teamwork and how to navigate the various components of the WebQuest, they will be better equipped to succeed in their teams. As I reflect on the progress of each team and individual over the entire project, I expect more tweaks or larger changes will become evident.

Feel free to check out this WebQuest at The Family Tree of Abraham and His Future Family.