Literacy Project

Jay and I completed our literacy project as a collaborative effort.  Our project focused on the topic of the five senses.  The kindergarteners have been exploring the five senses as part of their science unit.  The second graders have been exploring this topic as a way to expand their writing using details gained from the five senses.  After completing a nature walk and note-taking sheet, students came together to write a poem (written by second graders) and draw a corresponding picture (kindergarteners).  As a way to publish their work, we made a movie of the students "performing" their poem.

We plan to work together in this way throughout the year.  Students have developed relations across these grade levels that will support a lot of what we need to do this year.  The second graders felt a real sense of pride as they worked as mentors for the kindergarteners.  We will continue to work to foster these positive collaborative relationships.

Class Reflection

This course has opened my eyes to so many wonderful digital tools as well as the importance of using technology to foster collaboration.  By completing the course reading, participating in class discussions and projects, and by experiencing all of the vast information on the various blogs, I now am aware how important these tools are as a teacher.  Students can be so easily involved in the technology process through tools such as voki, animoto, and iMovie.  I look forward to continuing to expand my own repertoire with using technology with my students.

Below is the voki that I created to sum up my thoughts on the course.  Uncle Sam tries to capture his audience and persuade them to join his fight for the cause of technology integration.  I hope that he enlists the help of many of you.

Digital Story Inspiration

After creating my own digital story for use with my class, I have been brainstorming other ways to incorporate digital stories into my students' learning.  Of course I had to go no further than Kathy Cassidy's blog to find another inspiring, yet simple, idea.

In this post, Kathy embedded an end-of-the-year digital story of her kids telling about what they learned in first grade.  I love how each child got a chance to reflect on his/her learning.  Each year I usually have students write about their learning from the year, however I have never thought about making a digital story to showcase this same learning.  Below you will find a link to view this inspiring post.

Kathy Cassidy's Class Video

I am also thinking that I could do something similar to what Kathy did in this video, but instead I could do it on a more frequent basis (maybe monthly?).  I could then post it on our class weebly website in a blog post.  This would be a great way to showcase to parents the learning that we have done throughout the month.  Thanks for the inspiration Kathy!

Does anyone else use this sort of digital story with their kids in order to track their learning?