Sarah and Andy are teaching 7th graders this year, but I am teaching 8th grade. Most of my students were with me last year as 7th graders and we used technology frequently. That means when this year began, most of my students already knew how to use Google Apps. They knew how to save and share documents, how to format them for printing, and how to locate their documents in their Google Docs folder. They also knew how to use Google Presentations and created reports in my class (in collaboration with their Science teacher) and their History class. This meant that they began the year from a different vantage point than the 7th graders on this grant.
Project #1 - Blogging about Class Novel
As the year began, we read the book Party Girl by Lynne Ewing and students blogged about it. My goal was for them to learn more than the mechanics of blogging (such as signing in, creating/editing posts, and commenting). I also wanted to use the blog as a tool to help them consider the novel more deeply than they would have if taught in the traditional, non-technical way.
It worked.
Here, here and here are links to a few good examples. Here are a few examples from the next class novel, Copper Sun. My students are true digital natives. When they posted on the blog, their answers were much deeper and more thoughtful than they would have been if I had given them the same questions to discuss orally or in writing. Plus, we took advantage of one of the great powers of blogging: the democratization of the conversation. Everyone had a voice, not just the loudest and most assertive. This voice was heightened when they began posting comments on each other's comments. The media of blogging made all the difference.
The drawbacks:
- Blogger is not Facebook. It's hard to comment on comments. But I tried to respond to students like this.
- I messed up with the permissions several times, leading to mischief like this. Additionally, I found that sometimes I didn't want a dialogue on the blog - I just wanted students to answer questions. But, if I left comments visible, students copied each other. Not a good idea. So sometimes I made comments invisible while students were posting and then revealed them later.
Project #2 - Quick Assignments
- To study textual patterns and structures, I posted these scans from the 8th grade Science textbook and asked pairs of students to analyze each. The students wrote their answers on paper. Now I know better. I can have students create a Google doc and then send it to me with a "Turn It In Form" like this. Still, technology enabled me to create a lesson that would have been very time consuming to do by hand.
- To analyze setting, I put students in pairs, then prepared a page for each pair on a wiki. Each page had two pictures (from Flickr using the Creative Commons license). There, they had to analyze the five parts of setting: place, time, customs, environment and mood. Unfortunately, the network access point in my classroom is so slow, and my computers are so old, that many of the students didn't finish (some didn't even start) because loading the pages took so long. Good assignment, poor execution. Here and here are the links to some finished student work.
- "Passing Out Paper" using Google Docs' "Make a Copy" Feature - I don't have a color printer, but I don't need one. I can put as many color images as I want on a Google doc. The problem is, without a technology upgrade in my room, the pictures don't load fast enough. This assignment worked OK, but again, the technology hurdles made it hard for everyone to do their best.
Project #3 - Chat Rooms in the Classroom
Using a chat room site (http://www.Todaysmeet.com), my students chatted as characters from our class novel, Copper Sun. Before even touching the computers, I helped them prepare for the chat by assigning each student one of the four characters. Over the next few days of reading, each student annotated everything they read related to their character. The goal was for them to know enough about the character to role play and interact with other "characters" by the time they got to the chat room.
The day before the chat, I set up five chat rooms, assigned each student to a room (see here) , and gave them a series of prompts to which they responded. http://todaysmeet.com/CopperSunPer7Group4/transcript.
As you can probably tell, my students enjoyed this activity and I got a sense of the extent to which they understand this portion of the book, and the individual characters. Plus, the activity pushed them high on Bloom's Taxonomy ("Synthesis") by combining information to create a new product (a chat). You can read my full post about this project here.
