Some amazing student-centered learning is happening in the last few months at SSHS. Our Government and Economics classes are going all out with seniors, even at the end of the year. A 3 week long PBL is just now getting off to it's grand start. The PBL is covering the 1st 100 Days of Donald Trump's presidency. The students will, in the end, have created a Look Back production over the current presidency. But before they can get started with that, students used FlipGrid to record some of their current thoughts and opinions on what Donald Trump has done. The topics range from immigration to taxes. It has been so much fun listening to all the amazing videos that the students have come up with. Now there was some hindrance in the beginning, as many were nervous about recording themselves. But as the project has evolved, the students have really opened up and moved beyond the nerves. Such an awesome thing to watch! Check out the video below that I made using Adobe Spark.
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The English III team had a great couple of days pushing their students collaboration, communication, critical thinking skills, and of course content knowledge. The beauty of BreakoutEDU is the ability to incorporate 21st Century Skills along with content driven lessons.
What did the Breakout incorporate? 1. Clue 1 incorporated content knowledge of the Great Gatsby and puzzles. Students had to analyze symbols in the book as they related to characters. Then they had to decode the names and complete the code using some basic math skills. 2. Clue 2 used knowledge of colors in the books. They filled in quotes with the correct color symbols, which eventually lead to a WORD code. 3. Code 3 required students to put the book events in order to open the directional lock. 4. Code 4 then had them read a passage, finding literary devices, and using those line numbers to open the last box. How were 21st Century Skills involved? Students had to collaborate with their group in order to understand the clues. Through collaboration they used critical thinking skills to not just understand the content of the game, but to solve puzzles. Oftentimes in secondary classes, content becomes the main focus to where there is no other focus on other skills. Was there high student engagement? Absolutely! While I will not go on and say every student was engaged 100% of the time, and not every student loved the challenge, but I would definitely say that most did. Throughout the game you could find students talking it out (even arguing on who was right), competing to get to to open the box first, running through the library to find the clues the fastest, asking questions, and most of all seemed to have a genuine interest in completing the breakout and having fun. To me, the best part, was to see the kids in action and watch their thinking occur in physical ways. Teachers, don't be scared to try new things and get a little "out there." Students appreciate the time and effort you put into lessons to make them engaging. Don't let the 1-2 students who don't like to be challenged, keep you from challenging the others. Try it, you'll like it! You can find the resources for this Breakout here. Overview: The English I classes are completing their unit on Cultural Diversity. In this unit they read White Like Me by Tim Wise and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexi. For their concluding project, students were given a Group Identity Project. The project asked students to pick a group that they most closely identified with, and then create a presentation using Smore, to sell that group to others. What is Smore? Smore.com is a website that allows the user to create a flyer that can be printed, embedded, or linked. There are options to insert text or pictures and has a multitude of templates to choose from. Best of all, it is free and very easy to use. Check out the pictures below of some of the Smores created by our awesome English I students. Ms. Robinson has taken group work to a whole new level using the Collaboration Space feature in OneNote. Each group creates a page in the collaboration space to collect and record information being researched. OneNote also makes it easy for the teacher to track the amount of work each member is contributing to the group. In the image below, you can see initials showing which students posted which information. It also allows you to hover over the initials to see when the last edit was made by each student. For this particular project, after the information is collected, students will create a PowerPoint presentation to display the information. That PowerPoint file can be uploaded back onto the OneNote page for the teacher or other group members to edit.
Our English III team is using the highlighter features in OneNote to help identify musical devices found in literature. First and foremost, instructions need to be VERY clear. In the first section, the content directions are stated. After the content directions are given, it is important to follow up with very specific tech directions as well. While we think students know how to work technology, many of them do not. So don't forget your tech directions. Below you will find the tech directions that were left for the students on their OneNote page. Here is an example of student work using the OneNote highlighting feature. This same feature could be used any all subjects. Students could use the highlighting feature to break down different aspects of text, highlight important parts of an article, or break apart notes.
Awesome SSISD choir teacher, Beth Cole, is a OneNote wiz kid! She uses OneNote to help facilitate her choir kids learning about rhythm. Directions are written clearly, she has hyperlinked her important outside websites, and asks them to create videos to show their understanding.
Check out the example below. You can see the actual sample on our public OneNote page: http://bit.ly/2dlZngf under the Fine Arts tab. Below are some screenshots of the page. I first want to brag on our English III team (Mrs. Westberry, Mrs. Hodges, and Mrs. Adamson) were an amazing group of teachers with an abundance of ideas. They were able to accomplish and finish so much in our 1/2 day of technology and curriculum planning. So I want to show off some of the cool things that they have worked on. First, they decided to stick mostly to OneNote and learn to incorporate most of their ideas through OneNote pages. While they may have used some outside website, everything was linked back to OneNote to keep things simple for their students. So here are some of the creative ideas that were worked on: Short Story Unit In the short story unit they were able to create a hyperdoc that walked students through satire. It started with a simple example of satire, then had them apply their understanding of satire to the short story they were reading, and lastly asked the students to create their own example of satire in their everyday lives through a comic. In this unit they also discuss foreshadowing. Using OneNote they attached their short story and a concept map for the students to use and display examples of foreshadowing in their reading. Here is a screenshot of that page. The Crucible The next unit was The Crucible. In this unit, an emphasis was placed on character development. So a couple of pages were made for students to analyze a particular character or to rank the characters by morality. Here are screenshots of those assignments. And who does the crucible without going on a witch hunt?! The team found an online witch hunt through National Geographic. They hyperlinked the URL into their OneNote page. Those were just a few of the activities that were accomplished that day. Excited for students to continue on this journey with our amazing teachers.
Lesson Objective: Completing bell-ringers and homework quizzes to become more acquainted with Spanish
How was technology used in this lesson? Students use One Note to complete bell-ringers and homework quizzes, by answering a few questions she has shared with us. How did technology enhance your lesson? It made it easier to complete and work with giving students the ability to understand it better. What a student had to say: Mrs. Grafton is making this easier on us and helping really understand the Spanish language and being able to learn in a way we are more comfortable with. Kevin Tanton used Microsoft Forms to check for understanding in his geometry classes after a completed lesson. The form used a teaching strategy called Triangle-Circle-Square. More on this strategy can be found at http://www.theteachertoolkit.com/index.php/tool/triangle-square-circle. The form can be seen below. When using forms, results can be seen accumulated into a spreadsheet. This makes reading the data easy and fast. After reviewing the information, plans can then be made to review some of the questions and thoughts the next day at the beginning of class or made into a bellringer. Below are the answers to the form from one period. Taking the teacher out of the center room and allowing students to be in charge of their learning is what OneNote, the Collaboration Space, and a little bravery can do for you! Mrs. Hodges got her students researching, creating, and sharing notes through the collaboration space. Learning Objective: Students will be able to discuss chemical properties, physical properties, and states of matter. Lesson Before: Lecture from PowerPoint using project and Promethean board Lesson Using Student Laptops: Students were placed into 6 groups. Groups 1 and 2 were given Topic 1, 3 and 4 were given Topic 2, and 5 and 6 were given Topic 3. Each group had a given amount of time to research their topic and take notes in the collaboration space. After time was up, they paired up with their corresponding group to compare answers. Any changes that needed to be made could be made now and then a spokesperson was chosen. The spokesperson was in charge of explaining their topic to the rest of the class. Below are examples from the Collaboration Space that were generated in one of her class periods.
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