EDUC+8Y24+–+Sec5+Reviews

Incorporating YouTube to the classroom can engage students in a new and exciting way! Give the students fun and educational videos to watch, maybe it is something they have never seen before: This YouTube video is amazing footage of a chicken embryo developing. Students can see in real life the growth of a chicken [] Students can then view this YouTube video of a chicken hatching. [] Sonya Sidorkewicz

"I Spy" Stories: These "I Spy" stories are great! I'm sure many of us have enjoyed a few in our time. Who knew they could be used for teaching?! They are so fun and are excellent for integrated learning. You can use this type of activity in pretty much every subject. For language arts, you can teach a poetry lesson by asking students to also pay attention to the rhyming scheme, alliteration, personification (and so on) while searching for items that may relate to another topic in language arts, or social studies, math, science. It is a very engaging activity that is a lot of fun. I plan on using this program for my block as I believe that the students would really enjoy it and potentially learn a lot. This is a great 21st century program that is engaging and educational! I highly recomment it! :) Rachel VanDooren

Photo Albums Electronic photo albums tell the story of the student's life by using photos or family movies. The students can record music or their own audio to describe how each image represents the student's life. Through this activity students learn how images can convey a story and that there are many forms of communication, the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words" will have much more meaning to them. Students will be engaged in what they are learning due to the fact that they will feel personally connected to the material because they will use their own pictures and videos. This activity could be used in history, students could make a electronic photo album about the life of a historical figure. I think this is a great activity to get 21st century learners involved in technology and become engaged in what they are learning! Zeena Abu-jazar

8Y24 Lab 5 Sarah Townsend Wiki

Incorporating a wiki in encourages students to work collaboratively they are able to share their work, work on the page at the same time, and access it from any computer. The wiki allows students to use and experiment with technological skills. The wiki encourages the students to multimedia tools such as text, pictures, sounds, and videos. Having a variety tools embedded in an informational resources will help students think more critically, it creates a safe environment for students to be creative and a place for students to share their interests directly or indirectly. Wikis are a great opportunity to focus different topics and broad introduction and use of research skills.

Lauren Saunders Scavenger Hunts After reviewing the chapters, I thought the scavenger hunt in chapter 3 would be very useful and engaging for students of all levels. The scavenger hunt would be a great way for students to get used to using a search engine by themselves, but still having guidance from their teacher. More advanced students can be given the seach engine, but can come up with seach words on their own. Overall, great idea!

Noelle Butler ePhoto Albums ePhoto Albums are digital stories/ movies that tell the story of the student’s life by adapting digital photos, scanned images, yearbooks, or old family movies. Although, I don't see a photo album as the only viable project here. This type of assignment can take the form of a lesson oon the child's culture for social studies, or their very own story boards for narratives in english, as well as a newspaper for french class. The ideas are endless, and the ephoto album incorporates technical knowledge with meaningful instruction. Students will be interested and engaged with almost any assignment which takes the form of that which they are most comfortable, ie: technology.

Maggie Mongeon Blogs

A great activity to incorporate into your class as a teacher is to have your students blog, and create a classroom website that attaches links to each student's blog. By encouraging your students to blog about activities they are completing in class or interesting resources they want to share, you are providing them with opportunities to share their inner-most thoughts which will encourage higher-order thinking. Within the current curriculum, most subjects are encouraging teachers to incorporate student reflection as often as possible in order to allow the students to become aware of how they came up with ideas or solutions. Blogs provide a 21st century outlook for allowing students to share this inner reflection and as a result it can encourage collaboration, discussion and growth! As a teacher, you can read your students' blogs as a way to get to know each student better and to learn how they think, strategize, and learn.

Sandhya Kemkar Acrostic poems

After learning it in the language class at teacher's college, I really found the wiki activity of creating acrostic poems very useful. It has an online dictionary, the Wikipedia meaning of Acrostic poem,an example,the tools required to create this kind of poem like a brainstorming sheet and the final product can be seen as a visual. When I opened the link for acrostic poem tools, I found that it provided blank boxes for entering name and title of the poem. Then I could enter words in the brainstorming sheet with the set of alphabets used in the word chosen for the poem. Once I had done that, it provided hint words to add to the adjectives used in the brainstorming sheet. And just like that, by using the online tool, I could create my acrostic poem.This tool also gives the user an opportunity to go back and forward to previous pages in order to make changes. This tool can be very useful in a language class at school, as it provides students to explore this form of poetry using technology.I could assess their language skills by looking at what adjectives they selected to construct the poem.

Katie Sullivan Electronic Photo Albums A lot of the activities presented in this chapter provide highly revelant opportunities for 21st century learners to become engaged in their learning. One activity I could easily imagine integrating into the classroom would be the electronic photo albums. These 'ephoto albums' are comprised of student's pictures and movies. Within the album, the student can infuse music, narrative and text to explain how the photos relate to the student's life. I think this is an extremely engaging activity because it allows students to explore their identity and use their digital skills to participate in this meaningful and highly revelant activity. When students are given the opportunity to present information on themselves through their own creative processes, they become intrinsically motivated to participate in classroom activities that provide this. Apart from being used as individual expressions of identity, these photo albums could also be used when studying the lives of historical figures or characters in their favourite books. This activity allows for a great deal of engaging, meaningful learning opportunities.

Rachel Telzer Newsletter One activity I found to be of particular interest is the creation of Newsletters (a printed report which typically answers the 5 W questions in journalistic or informational writing). Students could create a monthly newsletter for their class which could be organized under different themes depending on the time of year and what they are working on in other subjects. The class could be divided into groups with each group rotating through the various segments of the newsletter (i.e. headlines, school events, special interest stories, interviews, etc.). The students could be assessed on how well they organize and communicate their ideas to their target audience.

Sarah Schoonderwoerd Oral History Activity This activity allows students to compare and contrast certain details about their life to their parents or grandparents life, such as the difference in roles and responsibilities when both generations were in Grade One. Students will learn how to use a digital recorder as they will record an interview with their parents or grandparents and share this information with the class. I could adapt this activity to a Physical Education lesson by getting the students to compare and contrast the activities/sports they play in gym class to the activities/sports their parents or grandparents played in Physical Education class. I would assess the students knowledge and understanding of how certain activities have developed into the way students play these activites in class today.

Cassie Partridge

I think that using Photo Essays through digital story telling is a great way to encourage students who may not have strong language skills. In today's classroom there are a variety of learners (visual, kinesthetic, etc) as well as a variety of cultures and backgrounds. For students who may be coming to Canada from another country or born in Canada but never learning English until school, photo essays would help to get their point across without burdening them with the language. Students can be creative and imaginative as well as informative. They can use oral histories to share their own personal experiences and get to use the language by communicating with others. They can also use ISpy books to identify key vocabulary and match the words with the picutures. Students of all levels would be able to use photo essays to different capacities and all of them would reap the benefits from an activity such as this one.

Melissa Purville ====Descriptive stories coupled with digital story telling is a perfect method for teachers to use to enhance the learning of today's students. Descriptive stories are a combination of detailed/vivid digital photographs with clear and concise writing. Together, they potentially teach a student imagery and foundational writing skills. I could see myself using descriptive stories (the conceptual dictionary) for all subjects but especially for social studies and math. Students would be able to take digital pictures of items and write definitions. This exercise would definitely assist students for studying purposes. Assessment would evaluate the organization of the dictionary and the representative digital image.====

Ashley Carvalho

Using digital story telling, in particularly photo essays, is a great way to combine old school with 21st century. Photo Essays are compromised of a piece of writing along with one or three digital images. Students learn to elaborate on their recorded thoughts and create more complex explanations. I could see myself using photo essays in history or language because it is an excellent way to teaching students that traditional methods of essay writing along with supporting images of their topic. In this case you could assess both the writing skill and the relevance of the images.

Marsha Pritchard

The use of digital storytelling, and in particular interactive stories, is a great way of motivating the 21st century student in the classroom as they mimic several features of a video game providing students with the responsibility of decision making. I think that an interactive story can best be related to a Choose Your Own Adventure where students must use their prior knowledge or new learning to make decisions that will lead a story in various directions. I could see myself using interactive stories in the classroom by having students make their own story regarding Biodiversity (grade 6 Science). Students may have to make decisions about what animals need more protection than others according to their abundance, place of origin and impact on the food chain, etc. to guide their peers to learning more about the complexity of conservation. You could assess a student’s depth of knowledge on Biodiversity during this activity as well as their ability to make meaningful connections to the importance of Biodiversity.

Jennifer Glanfield

LinkLists combined with Wikispaces are great activities to get students familiar with online research as well as different ways to "write up" a report. A LinkList is a pre-organized set of websites, games or online resources that a teacher prepares for the students. This gives students a reliable and approved set of resources and also prevents them from wandering off during research.The Wikispace is an online collaboration by a group of students or the entire class, who create an information page on a specific topic. Wikispaces also allow for students to share their work with others and see their work in a different context (online vs. written). A combination of the two activity types provides for greater online learning experiences and the opportunity to work with more than one tool in the same project/activity.

I could use these activity types in a lesson where students learn to research or are in the initial stages of a project. I could either assess research skills and how they analyze the information found; or the final written product from a Language perspective.



Jessica Garvey

Picture writing prompts and wikispaces or blogs would be a great activity to increase student engagement, motivation and learning. Picture writing prompts are images that can stimulate thinking for a piece of writing. The type of writing (narrative, expressive, procedural etc) would have to be specified by the teacher; however, graphics/images could be posted to the class blog or a class wikispace where students can share their writing with the class, parents and so forth. If using a class wikispace, students could collaborate on a group brainstorming of ideas regarding based on the graphic writing prompt and then from that list create their own writing pieces individually or in pairs. I could easily use this activity in a language lesson (or even in a social sciences lesson and integrate language into the lesson!). I would assess the final written piece for students language skills, dependent on the type of writing I require of students.

Josh Collett The idea of a Digital Story Starter sounds like an interesting and fun way to prompt students to write. This idea replaces a story starter of words with an image, usually a picture or a graphic, which the students are to then write a brief story around. I think it would be good in a writer’s workshop class in language arts, where pictures that are related can be distributed to the students, who are to write a brief piece about their picture, and incorporate them into a class eBook. Besides the content, I would also assess the design of the page to be used in the eBook. __

Andrew Giesbrecht Character Map or Web A character map or web is a visual map that a student could create that can show different categories of information and how they relate to each other. It identifies the traits of a main character to help the reader understand a character’s motivations or actions. A great time to use this would be after reading a short story or novel study by getting students to discuss the characters in small groups and elements about the characters. Using this activity, you could assess the student’s comprehension of the characters and the novel, and their analysis of the novel with respect to the impact it had on the characters in a positive or negative way. 

Jenn Graham Newsletter ﻿ I think the creation of newsletters is a fun way to incorporate project-based learning in the classroom. Students learn how to create a newsletter and value the newsletter as a learning and communication tool. For example, students can use newsletters as a different way to create a study guide, or use newsletters as a communication tool for the whole school. I can see media literacy being integrated easily into this project. At my internship school, students are learning about newspapers – the layout, purpose, and construction of them. The culminating project is to create a newsletter about a “fractured fairy tale”. Students must identify the 5 Ws/H of a well known fairy tale, and modify 2 of the 5 Ws/H to create a revised version of the fairy tale. However, the product must be presented as a front page news story. Students are learning a new way of writing, critical and media literacy, as well as developing skills to communicate in more diverse ways. They are really engaged with the creation of the product. They are able to choose which fairy tale to compete, how they want to modify it, the angle they wish to take in order to present the front page news story, and additionally students can get creative with the final newsletter product. I think the most important aspect of using project-based learning is to make it engaging and fun for the students, such that they are so focused on the task that they genuinely enjoy creating this project. When they have pride behind their learning, the activity has a deeper and more meaningful impact. <span style="color: black; display: block; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">

<span style="color: black; display: block; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">Kathryn Haynes <span style="color: black; display: block; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">Graphic Novels! <span style="color: black; display: block; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">Create one with your class! They are fun to read and write! It is an easy way to incorporate multiple subjects into one. I am using it as a culminating acitivity for my groups Grade 7 Social Studies Unit Program. They will be creating a Graphic Novel of the War of 1812. This activity will then incorporate Social Studies, Language and Visual Arts. After the unit, the students will be creating their own strips with particular themes, ie. causes, effects, people and events. After all the strips are done, they can be shared in the class and even printed out so that the students have a complete book about the War of 1812. It covers multiple subjects and the kids will not think twice about doing this. <span style="color: black; display: block; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="color: #800080; display: block; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">

** Picture Prompt Writing   ** This activity provides students with the opportunity to analyze a picture as a prompt for writing a story. I will use this activity for my micro teaching lesson. Students will be shown a picture painted Norman Rockwell and will be asked to write a narrative paragraph as a group. I will assess the title students create for the painting, why they chose the title they did and why they chose to write the narrative piece that they created (what influenced their thoughts etc). Kristina Bozzelli