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 Toasthttp://www.timetoast.com/,Tagxedohttp://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
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.
As a new program at our religious school, we have moved towards project based learning. Next year’s big idea will be the Torah. Due to this, I decided to make my project an exploration of the Torah stories. My goal for the project was to assign each student one of the better known stories from the Torah, and to have them create a presentation that they can proceed to share with the class.
To start, I will use www.randomizer.org in order to fairly assign the students a story from the following list:
Creation
Adam & Eve
Cain & Abel
Noah’s Ark
Tower of Babel
Sodom & Gomorrah
Binding of Isaac
Jacob & Esau
Joseph
Moses
They will then be tasked with reading the portion in which their story takes place (or compiled excerpts based on the length.) I will point them towards http://www.biblegateway.com in order to find an online copy.
Once they've absorbed the material, they will be asked to create a graphic, using either wordle or tagxedo and the text from the passage. They will be asked to write a short analysis of why they think some of the words were so common.
Their next task will be to create a summary of their passage, and to use voki to present it.
Following that, they will be asked to use http://www.timetoast.com/ in order to create an interactive timeline of the passage. They will be required to include descriptions with each plot point, as well as a minimum of 3 images.
For the final presentations, they will be asked to dress as a character from their passage. They will then share the passage with the class, and they will present their word clouds, vokis and timelines.
Through this each student will have at the very least a rudimentary grasp of the stories.
From the beginning, the idea of
this fellowship excited me. As someone who has grown up surrounded by
technology and who is just delving into teaching, the intersection of the two
was a point of difficulty. I lacked ideas of how to meld the two, but I was already
optimistic of the benefits the combination could impart to the classroom.
Having seen how integral technology was in the lives of my students, it was
crucially important that I use it to attract their attention to class.
I have learned many varied things
from this fellowship. On a class wide scope, learning how to manufacture
quizzes with Google documents, how to make flash cards online with quizzlet, and
how to make entrancing visuals with programs such as tagxedo and wordle will all
be used weekly in my class. On a macro level, our in depth exploration of the
uses of wikis has inspired me to, in my role as technology coordinator for the
religious school, to create a wiki for our school. This will be extremely
useful to connect to parents, keep track of kids' work, and to keep track of
the multiple facets of the technology we use.
I intend to use all we've learned
as both a springboard for further exploration, as well as to pass it on to my
fellow educators and down to my students. I hope to encourage our school as a
whole to take advantage of this opportunity to forge forward, and to avoid
stagnation. I am most excited to see in what ways I can use what I learned to
engage my students, and to relate better to them. Many of the ideas shared with
us were new and fresh to me, and I can't wait to try to fit them into a lesson
plan. These ideas include web quests, vokis, online games, and the various
timeline generators.
The final, critical idea I took
away from the fellowship came from my own experiences learning during its
duration. I discovered that technology can be a useful tool, but cannot replace
classic instruction. I was reminded of the dangers of overwhelming students. I
hope to avoid that pitfall, and to apply all we have looked into as part of
next year’s curriculum.
This year our three-year-old class, the Dubim, is blessed with students from all over the world. Taking full advantage of our parents and the internet, we decided to study a little bit about each of the cultures represented. We started by identifying where each child is from using Google Maps and our classroom world map.
We asked the student what they wanted to learn about the different nations. This student did not want to speak, so I typed her questions into the program for her. Here are her questions:
We then looked up the flags. Working as a group, we created flags from each nation and then worked on individual flags to display then take home.
USA and Belgium
Brazil
South Korea
Israel
We created a matching game with the flags.
Here the students are describing our wall of flags and how we made them.
Parent Participation
When the parents came in, they showed us pictures of houses, played games, sang songs, and read books in their native languages. We played an origami based game for Japan, and ate waffles for Belgium. (They were delicious!) Here is the recipe for the waffles - in Metric, of course!
Ingredients: 250g ordinary flour, 250g castor sugar, 250g butter, 4 eggs, vanilla sugar or extract to taste
Preparation: Mix the flour and sugar. Blend in melted butter and the 4 egg yolks. Mix well. Whip egg whites with a pinch of salt until they form peaks. Blend them into the mixture along with the vanilla. Important! Leave the dough to sit for at least three hours before cooking.
Then I heat my waffle iron to the max, to then reduce heat and start baking at a good speed. This means your first two waffles are always slightly burnt, but you are making a batch anyway so just throw those out :-) I always lightly brush the inside before baking the first waffle, but I don't repeat that afterwards. The trick is to not open the iron until you hear the sizzling stop, otherwise you will tear the waffles apart.
Languages
Children are always interested in birthdays. One of the ways we looked at the various cultures was by watching a video of the song, "Happy Birthday" in Korean. The children were delighted.
We learned to say "Hello" in all the languages represented in the classroom. The children from the various countries helped us with the pronunciations.
Student Comments
Finally, some of the children commented on what they had learned. They picked Avitars, backgrounds, and then recorded their comments.
This is a lesson presenting the famous Hillel and Shammai "On One Foot" debate. It is part of a larger history unit that spans the course of our year. The lesson is presented in the form of a web quest scaffold in a google presentation. The students will start by watching a movie on youtube and then prepare for a class discussion to make sure everyone is on the same page in their comprehension after the video. Then the students will make their own videos using their computers' webcams or one of the hand held video cameras our school has available. They will be making a series of two videos with their group, one a short video explaining how to tie one's shoes (sub ten seconds) and another longer video explaining how to tie one's shoes (a minute or longer.) As the students move through the lesson they will add their own slides on to the end of the presentation, the first being a slide with both of their videos uploaded. Afterwards, to take the idea an move in a more intellectual direction the students will read an article from DOGO, a kid friendly news source, and then create a short video or comic strip with the tools at Primaryaccess.org to explain their article in a Hillel and Shammai like manner. Once they have loaded this into a slide at the end of the presentation they will choose one other group's article and presentation, look through it, and comment. Reflections: I have found in teaching lessons in this style it is very important to put the right group of kids together. Technology seems to be able to exacerbate bad group dynamics, as everyone wants a turn and anyone who is not proficient in the use of the computer tends to feel a tremendous amount of pressure from their classmates. I have seen that different groups will try to share the computer in different ways, such as one student using the keyboard and another using the mouse. Creating clear rules about how the computer can and should be shared seems important to reduce the risk of problems arising in the groups.
