My students are very much excited to be blogging, and they even look forward to each new blog assignment. I have been assigning them weekly, and the response has been pretty positive. Imagine... students looking forward to homework. My biggest challenge continues to be making them relevant to both my students and to my curriculum.
Now that my students have completed their research for the vodcast project, it is time to move to the next step. I have taken pictures of them investigating and observing their crayfish. I also want to give them the opportunity to find images that they might want to use for the characterist attribute that they are responsible for. With those tools, they are going to use Microsoft PhotoStory to put together their mini movies. These mini movies (chapters) will be joined together for one presentation. To accomplish this, they must understand how to use the tools. I will be working with our library media specialist and technology integration facilitator to help teach my kids how to do this. In the real work, the most difficult thing is scheduling.
Once we conquer this monumental task, we can move onto the next one...
My thought for the day as I sit here on a Sunday watching football... is this working? They are excited about using this technology, but is it serving their needs? I will surely have to use PhotoStory again to reinforce what they have learned, and also if they are competent and confident with it, why not take advantage of that 'prior knowledge'? Is this scaffolding at the technology level? I guess so, but then again isn't technology an area that is truly scaffolded? Isn't each skill learned truly reinforced in some way whether it is how to use a word processing program, learning to type, moving the mouse or even touching a SMARTboard?
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