“I don’t really like writing,” said one of my particularly uninhibited students towards the end of last year, “no one ever sees it… it doesn’t seem very important.” At the ripe old age of 6 this student constantly surprises me and today she really hit the nail of the head. We are constantly giving our students work and tasks that have a acutely limited audience and little real world significance. For our second last unit of 14-15 school year we made an iBook of student created documentaries on animals they were interested in an attempt to combat this early elementary apathy.
Students worked with me in pairs or independently on their documentary. The first assessment of the project was to draw a picture of their animal making sure to include as many details as they could. Then after a short group discussion the students searched for information to answer a short list of generic questions the class had agreed on. The first few questions required simple responses while as the last two were more open ended, allowing for differentiation according to student ability. Students search for information within books from our school Learning Commons (collated by our Teacher Librarian) and also from a few websites with age appropriate content curated on a Pinterest Board I put together.
Students wrote answers to the questions and this became the second assessment of the project. Student then participated in a teacher conference about their ‘script’ and how they would divide it up for each group member when necessary etc.
Students then search Creative Commons images from Flickr.com to illustrate their script. We used the Typic app to brand each image with the Creative Commons logo and link to the image on Flickr.com.
Even though this took longer than I would of liked – the discussion around academic honesty and digital integrity was fantastic.
It is a little late but it is now published on the iTunes store, for free. We hope you like it and if you would like to leave any comments we would be very excited to receive them.
