Project 2: Glog

Here is the link to my Glog: Click Here

I have looked at many Glogs before, but this week’s assignment was my first time creating my own Glog.  I must say that I am now LOVING Glogster, and can not wait to use it with my students in the coming school year!  I think that the possibilities for its use are endless, and I know my students will thoroughly enjoy creating their own Glogs.

This Glog that I created would be used at the end of Unit 2 for my 6^th grade French IA class.  The last two topics of Unit 2 are the date and the weather.  This Glog could be used as a review for these topics for the whole class, or as a differentiated activity for students that need more review and practice.  I was lucky to find a video on Discovery Education that addressed both the weather and dates.  There are not many videos on Discovery Education about French vocabulary and grammar, but luckily this “Standard Deviants” series is fantastic!

The Maryland Voluntary State Curriculum Standards this Glog addresses are as follows:

1.2.A.c. Demonstrate understanding of developmentally appropriate information gained through active listening or reading by applying it to a different context.

1.3.A.a. Write and deliver short descriptions about very familiar topics of personal interest.

2.2.A.d. Identify countries, regions, and geographic features where the target language is spoken

4.1.A.d. Compare and identify the use of idiomatic expressions between the target language and English

Standard 1.2.A.c. is addressed by the Discovery Education assignment, as well as the review games.  Students have to watch and listen, and then apply what they learn.  Standard 1.3.A.a. is addressed in the writing portion of the assignment.  2.2.A.d. is addressed by having students write about the weather in a French speaking country.  They would need to find out where the city is located, as well as the general climate.  Standard 4.1.A.d. is addressed by reviewing what is taught in class about the structure of the dates and weather.  The format for both of these is quite different from English. 

Using Glogster in my class will help  my students develop their creating minds.  “The challenge to the educator is to keep alive the mind and the sensibility of the young child” (Gardner, pg. 84).  I think that an assignment using Glogster will help to do just that.  My students will be excited to make Glogs, because they will enjoy the opportunity to be creative in showing what they know.  More and more in the world, creativity is  “sought after, cultivated, and praised” (Gardner, pg. 77), and Glogster is a wonderful tool to encourage creativity!

Gardner, H. (2007). Five Minds for the Future. Harvard Business School Press: Boston, MA.

Blog on Content Creation

For this week’s blog, I needed to talk to a student about creativity and technology.  I have a former student that I was able to get in touch with.  This student, Morgan, was in my French class for all three years of middle school.  Last year, when Morgan was a freshman, I kept in good touch with her.  We have two middle schools and one high school under one roof, so when Morgan went to high school, she was still able to visit me often.  She would volunteer in my classroom two days a week to earn service hours.  Morgan is an amazing kid, and a student that I will always remember.  She is extremely bright and thoughtful, so I knew that I would get some good insight if I e-mailed her about this assignment.  Here are the questions I asked her, and her responses.

1) Do you feel like you are able to be creative in school?

I really only feel creative in my Creative Writing class. All the other classes, not so much. My classes were IB classes, so they were more focused on learning the material and getting the work done rather than creativity. Some, like my English and Art class were exceptions, but other than that I could not be very creative in class.

2) In which classes do you feel that you are able to be the most creative?

I personally feel most creative in my writing class. I am an author, so that class gave me the chance to expand my creative bounds and helped me learn more about writing to make me better. That writing class gave me more knowledge ALONG with letting my creative brain be free and inspirational.

3) Do you think that technology allows you to be more creative?

It all depends on what technology is being used. Smart boards and Power Points have a higher creative use than Word Document. It also depends on the assignment given by the teacher. So possibly.

4) What are some projects/assignments that you have done using technology that have allowed you to create something (like a video, presentation, voice recording, etc.)

In my technologies class, we had to create a power point describing a story we went through once in our life. We used music and pictures from the trip if you had them. We also typed the words, or spoke them verbally, to explain the story. This project was fun but also taught us how to use the program we were using to create the story.

5) What are some ways that your teachers could allow you to be more creative while still accomplishing the goals of the class?

One way to do it would be have many more projects with creative freedom and a lot of crafts or other things that we create. High schoolers LOVE crafts and projects :) It’s the sad truth that we keep avoiding. If you twist the learning into crafts, we teens will realize 'Hey... we just learned something!!!'

Morgan’s responses made me smile.  She writes just like the author/history teacher she plans to be one day!  I like how she says that her creative writing class allows her “creative brain to be free”.  Wouldn’t it be great if this could occur in more classes than just creative writing?  I also like how Morgan talks about how students learn best when they don’t realize they’re learning.  I think that by using digital media and technology, we can allow this to occur more often. 

Creativity in the Classroom

Sir Ken Robinson’s speech is one that I have viewed many times.  I have seen it in previous Wilkes classes, as well at professional development sessions through my school and school district.  I think the message that Sir Ken Robinson gives is very powerful, and something that should be thought about very carefully. 

In many ways, our schools do kill creativity.  There is so much focus on meeting standards, and paperwork, and standardized testing, and so many other things, that teachers don’t get to do what they really need to do –which is to teach.  No two kids are the same, so give each kid the same education just doesn’t make sense.  Each student has different interests, skills, and capabilities.  We need to help them discover these, and foster them.  As Sir Ken Robinson said, “all kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them” (Robinson, 2006).  For example, in my school district, middle school students only have their “encore “ classes on a three day rotation.  So a student might have a week where they only have art class one time.  My best friend is our school’s art teacher, so I spend a lot of time in her classroom, and I see students that struggle in my French class (which is more “academic”) absolutely flourishing in her art class.  Yet these students only get to be in a class that they enjoy and in which they find success every three days. 

Sir Ken Robinson talked about how “we have no idea what’s going to happen in terms of the future”, and how “education is meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp” (Robinson, 2006).  We really don’t know what kind of future we are preparing our students for, so the best we can do is help them develop a variety of skills.  Creativity is one of these skills, and I feel it is one of the most important.  Gardner talks about how companies such as Google value creative thinking, and how many other companies are starting to do the same.  We are doing our students a huge disservice if we don’t encourage creativity.  “Parallels about between the synthesizing and the creating minds”, so we need to do whatever we can to develop both (Gardner, pg 88).

So, how do we go about fostering creativity in our classrooms?  There is no easy answer, but I think that technology can certainly help.  One of my favorite projects I have ever done was last year’s final project with my 8^th grade French II students.  We finished the curriculum early, so I needed a project for the last week and a half of the school year.  I split the class into groups, gave each group a topic we had studied during the year and a flip camera, and said “go”.  I put no parameters on the assignment, and I was blown away with the result.  I had one group make a rap music video explaining the difference between “who” and “whom” in French.  Another group filmed an episode of a dramatic soap opera that taught direct and indirect object pronouns.  I was blown away by what they created, and they loved the project. There are many technologies and Web 2.0 tools out there that allow students to create unique and original material.  The more we can find ways to use these in our classes, the better off our students will be.

References:

Gardner, H. (2007). Five Minds for the Future. Harvard Business School Press: Boston, MA.

Robinson, K. (2006). Do schools kill creativity? [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

Media Infused Presentation

View My Prezi Here!

For this project, I designed a Prezi that could be used with my French II students to help them review the passé compose (past tense).  I really enjoyed creating this project, and can certainly see how projects such as this could help develop the disciplined and synthesizing mind.

Any project that uses a variety of types of media and sources is an effective project.  It allows students to look at a topic from a multitude of perspectives.  It also helps motivate students.  Each student has different interest and needs, and allowing students to use different sources and media types will help each student to relate to the assignment in some way.

In his book, Gardner discusses the issue where “students may have accumulated plenty of factual or subject matter knowledge, but they have not learned to think in a disciplined manner” (Gardner, pg 22).  This is certainly a problem that all teachers can relate to.  We want our students to not just recall facts or information, but to understand that information and apply it to various situations.  French is a topic that builds upon itself. There are many concepts that my students learn that they can use later on to predict new grammar rules.  Having my students create projects such as Prezis where they have to apply an old concept to a new one would help develop their disciplined minds.

Synthesis is also a very important skill for our students to learn.  Gardner defines synthesis as “the ability to knit together information from disparate sources into a coherent whole” (Gardner, pg 44).  When I created my Prezi, I did exactly that.  I took the topic of the passé compose, and then visited a variety of sites to gather information about the topic.  I even created some of my own media (the audio clips) to add to the final product.  I then combined all the information and media into a presentation that would concisely and completely review the passé composé.  My students could certainly create a similar project.  Doing so would help them develop their synthesizing minds.

This was my first time using Prezi, and I am already mentally planning various projects my students could do using Prezi.  If I am so excited about using Prezi, I can only imagine how excited my students will be about using it!

Gardner, H. (2007). Five Minds for the Future. Harvard Business School Press: Boston, MA.

The Synthesizing Mind

This week’s reading about the synthesizing mind came at the perfect time for me. For the past two weeks, I have been mentally planning a project for my 7^th grade students for the beginning of the school year.  I had been rolling ideas around in my mind trying to finesse this project, and Gardner’s chapter gave me  some good direction and more of a focus for the project.

As Gardner says, “The ability to knit together information from disparate sources into a coherent whole is vital today” (Gardner, pg 44).  I agree that synthesizing is a skill that needs to be developed in our students at an early age.  The project that I am planning has students synthesizing information from various sources in order to teach their classmates a topic.

My 7^th grade students are in French IB.  At my school, French I is split up over 6^th and 7^th grade into French IA and French IB.  When students come back in 7^th grade, I always face the issue that they have forgotten so much of what they learned in 6^th grade.  Since languages build so much on previous topics, it is vital that they review and, in many cases, re-learn what was taught in 6^th grade.  I usually spend the first month of school doing this review.  I find it difficult to come up with engaging lessons to re-teach what I taught the year before.  So I decided that, this year, I would have the students do the teaching.  I will assign students to small groups, and assign each group a topic that was taught in 6^th grade.  Each group will then be responsible for creating either  a Prezi or a Glog that teaches their classmates about their assigned topic.  Their Prezi or Glog will have to include information from the textbook, internet resources, a video that they create, connections to other subject areas, and more (again, I’m still developing this project).  Once students create their project, we will spend a few days in the computer lab having students view each other’s projects.  I think this assignment will be engaging for my students, and also help them to practice synthesizing information from a variety of sources.

When Gardner outlined the “Components of Synthesis” (pg. 48), I was immediately reminded of the IB-MYP Design Cycle.  Gardner’s components are:

·         A goal

·         A starting point

·         Selection of strategy, method, and approach

·         Drafts and Feedback

In my school, we use the IB-MYP Design Cycle when  students do larger projects.  The steps of the Design Cycle are:

·         Investigate

·         Design

·         Plan

·         Create

·         Evaluate

Both of these provide a similar framework for creating an effectively synthesized product. 

One of the components of the project is to have students relate their topic to another subject area.  My school focuses heavily on cross-curricular education, and I always enjoy seeing students make connections from one subject to another.  They often surprise me with the connections they make! “Interdisciplinary synthesis” is not always easy to achieve, but it is necessary for our students to look at a topic from a multitude of contexts (Gardner pg 50).  Our students need to take their lessons, and “transport at least part of those lessons across the hallway” (Gardner, pg 59).  I think including an interdisciplinary piece to the review project will help my students relate French to other topics.

I am excited to try this project out with my students next year.  I think that I now have a better idea as to what the final product should include, thanks to reading Gardner’s chapter on synthesis.  Being able to synthesize information is a vital skill, and I hope that I can do my part to develop it in my students.

References:

Gardner, H. (2007). Five Minds for the Future. Harvard Business School Press: Boston, MA.

IBO. (2005-2012). Middle years programme curriculum. Retrieved from http://www.ibo.org/myp/curriculum/group8/

Digital Media

Digital Media

In my French IA class, which a beginning level 6^th grade French class, one of the very first things we do is to learn the French alphabet and accents.  It is extremely important for students to learn about them, because it helps the students understand the rules of French pronunciation.  Once students learn the alphabet and accents, I can have them use what they know in order to figure out how to pronounce a new word they learn.  In searching through Discovery Education, I found the following two videos that address the French alphabet and accents.  They are from the same series – Standard Deviants School: The Flaky Pastry World of French.

Alphabet Video

Accent Video

I think that my students would love these videos.  They present the exact same material that I teach, but do so in a way that would really capture the students’ attention.  Many of the things they say in the video and the examples they use are ones that I use with my students.  These videos would strongly reinforce what I teach.

These videos would be helpful for my visual and auditory learners.  My special needs students would also benefit from these videos, as they present the material in a way that would appeal to them.  These videos are extremely engaging, and I look forward to showing them to my 6^th graders next year!

References:

Cerebellum (Producer). (2002). Section B: Accents and Frenchie Vowels. [Video Segment]. Available from http://www.discoveryeducation.com/


Cerebellum (Producer). (2002). Section B: Accents and Frenchie Vowels. [Video Segment]. Available from http://www.discoveryeducation.com/