Lego Logic: Building a City

I'm excited about this project: The students are creating a Lego City! They've been givin a lot each and with increasingly difficult challenges are tasked with developing their land, building houses, growing the community, and solving social problems around meeting the needs of the constituents.

Of course it costs money to build, so lego bricks aren't free. This means that after they've planned their layout, they've got to calculate the perimeter and then the total price to build a wall. Then they've got to build up... The greatest surprise in this is that as a school we ran out of red lego bricks (the cheapest at $2 per nub), meaning that students had to change their colours, costing them more money. More than a few students had to go back to the second challenge and re-build their floor plan.

We're really just getting started, so there will be much more to come!

The planning document is below (feel free to edit, please, we're looking for feedback!), and the challenge cards are here, too. Any thoughts will be hugely helpful and much appreciated!

Planning Document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NEDGzkbd062fZW0eGWYPp6QEBny0fXND19TE8gPLYmA/edit

Augmented Book Reviews

Aurasma

Augmented reality keeps blowing people's mind. Every time I show the things we do with Aurasma and QR Codes, people can not believe what they see. The concept of augmented reality is really quite simple (in idea anyway). It simply layers images/videos over a 2D image. In Aurasma, the trigger image essentially acts like a barcode.

iMovie

This project was mostly conducted on Macbook Pros and iMacs as the students created videos using iMovie Trailers. We decided we wanted to look at book reviews/reading response in another way. I saw a tweet on Twitter where someone was showing their book trailers in iMovie. I wanted to step it up and make book trailers and then attach them to a book cover so other's could see what that student thought of that particular book.

Planning the Trailer

First, students had to plan their trailer. This proved very difficult as these grade 4s had not used iMovie before and did not have a clue how it worked or what was involved. In the end, we scrapped the on-paper plan and just started building the iMovie project. This gave the students an idea what was required in iMovie.

Assessment

We didn't actually make any crieteria until our first couple of groups were "finished" their first edit. The reson for this was that the students didn't know what a good trailer would consist of. We looked at a couple professionally made animated movie trailers and discussed what made them awesome. From there we made a checklist then went on to building a rubric.

Target Rubric - Succes Criteria for our Book Trailers

Co-created checklist of how professional movie trailer are made

Students then went through and peer assessed each other's work. The feedback each student was important as they would base their editing on the feedback they were given. We developed a timeline of events so students knew the process that was required to finish their final trailer.

The Self Assessment, Peer Assessment and Feedback loops timeline

The Finished Product

Here is an example of the finished trailers using the Aurasma App. 

Grade 1: Celebrations!

Welcome to our Grade 1 Celebrations!

Over the last two months, all of the grade one students have been learning about Celebrations and Traditions. The students were encouraged to share about a celebration which they participate in, why it is important to them, and explain a tradition (something that they do every year) that they do every year for this celebration. They were asked to present this information to their peers and hopefully bring an artifact (object) to supplement their presentation.

Below, we have explained the learning process from beginning to finish, including the planning, preparation, instruction and assessment of this work in the Learning Commons. Please enjoy.

First we thought of all the celebrations we know.

Then we decided what would be needed for a decent presentation. We came up with the following sentence prompts and practiced with each other. 

We choose to talk about the celebration that was most important to us and filled in the needed information.

We tried to include most of the parents by sending home a form asking them to help fill it out with their child.

While the forms came in with detailed information about student's celebrations, we let others in the school share their celebrations with us. Since the grade three students were doing a similar project about Celebrations and Traditions around the World, we had a few students come in as expert speakers. We also had a grade one teacher share her Mother's Day celebration from Albania with us. 

We then shared our Celebrations and Traditions with each other with the sentence prompts on the SmartBoard in case we forgot what to say. We each brought an object to share that was related to our presentation.

While we were presenting our work to each other, our teachers helped us by asking us questions about our celebrations.  

Sometimes we took breaks and had questions to think about and answer in small groups. We were first asked, "What was the same or different between some of the presentations?" and then we were asked, "What is one thing we learned from a presentation?"

Web2.0 Symposium

On April 24, I had the opportunity to share two (three actually but the first two stole the show) web2.0 tools we are using at Marlborough School. Below is a link to the website I made to share these three great web2.0 tools, Aurasma, Qr Codes and Google Docs.

http://goo.gl/QD9Dk