Thinking About Learning

Yesterday was such an awesome day with my fifth graders! Thinking, technology, collaboration, collective problem-solving, and learning were playing a symphony in our class. My students have been working on creating digital stories. After using Open Mind to plan and write, they’ll use PowerPoint to put the stories together before using Photostory to narrate and create the video. They have finished the writing and have been working on the illustrations. They had a choice of drawing their pictures in Paint, Smart Notebook, or on paper. (Yes, paper! Some of my more artistic students felt like they had better control over colored pencils than a mouse.) The 3 types of illustrations required different methods of insertion into PPT, so they had to learn some new tech skills. The pencil and paper kids used a digital camera to take pictures of their drawings. The room was quietly humming as they helped each other learn how to insert their images. After they finished, they edited and peer edited some short paragraphs they had written after researching some inventions of the late 1800s. They have begun to post them on their individual blogs and comment on each other’s posts. We are slowly beginning to utilize Web 2.0! I was so proud of the ways they were interacting with each other to learn and generate products. It was a good day in our Global Horizons classroom.

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