First, there's our EcoReporters project of filming the salmon spawning in Scott Creek near our school. My class and I have taken the last three Wednesday afternoons to head down to the creek. Amazingly warm and sunny weather all 3 days, with enough rain in between to keep the water level high enough to allow the fish to swim up the creek. The students, in groups of 4 or 5, have spent time in class writing their own scripts about the salmon and filming each other by the creek with the fish running. We discovered that weirs had been built across the creek in 2 or 3 places to make deep water pools for the fish to rest in, which necessitated building fish ladders in the weirs. There hasn't been a huge number of live fish any of those days, but usually 2 or 3 valiantly struggling up the creek. Lots of dead fish, though, which has fascinated the kids, especially the boys, as much or more than the live ones! The dead fish smell last week was pretty strong! It's hard to keep the kids out of the water; they want to get to know the fish intimately, dead or alive! Trying to keep 22 kids quiet while one group is filming is not easy. After our first practice filming, I showed the videos to the class and we spent some time evaluating the pros and cons of each one. They realized that all the background noise made it hard to hear the kids who were speaking on camera. They're learning a lot about how to write a short (2-minute) script summarizing all the information they have researched about the fish and read their scripts in front of a camera. Not easy when you've never done it before! That's an aspect of language arts that's pretty new to them. After 2 hours of filming over the past 2 weeks, I hope we have enough footage to edit together to make our final presentation. When we do, I'll post some of it here for folks to see.
Our Edmodo social learning network is humming right along. The students are using it to help each other with assignments and to understand aspects of the technology we are using in all our projects.
The third project incorporating digital technologies is my last field study for LTT. It involves the students, in pairs, planning virtual trips to another country in the world with Googlemaps, and collaborating in the creation of the maps, i.e. asking each other questions and sharing ideas and tips via Edmodo. We have spent 5 or 6 weeks studying maps of the world - the continents, oceans, hemispheres, and the location of many countries. Just at the end of October, we were ready to start using Googlemaps to trace routes around the globe. I had 2 big questions: How could we trace routes across the oceans when Googlemaps would only give directions within one continental land-mass?; and how could we get the students saving their maps on the site without them using email addresses, which our school district doesn’t like using for elementary students. The answers to both questions came through trial and error. I discovered that when you save a map in “My Maps”, you can then edit it and draw lines anywhere on the map, across oceans or landmasses, and you can force the line to follow roads on land. Through a bit of searching on the Googlemaps users forum and more trial and error, I found that more than one person at a time can log into the same account to save and edit different maps. I set up a new account using my SD43 email address, gave it a generic password, and shared that with my students one Monday morning in the lab. 10 minutes later, we had 27 different computers all on the account, creating and saving maps to it. The response time is pretty slow with that many simultaneous users, but it works. Usually, we won’t all be on together; they will be working on our 3 classroom computers or at home. Already (Nov. 10) we have kids sharing ideas and questions about their maps on Edmodo. I have only a few weeks to finish that project, or at least get some data to report in my field study and prepare my comprehensive portfolio for our LTT course. So I'll go out with a bang as usual!
Oh yes, and there's 26 report cards to write in the next 2 weeks. Child's play!! If only I was a child!
Talk to you soon - send me some coffee!
