Whew! This has been a crazy semester. While I have been using great collaboration tools such as Padlet to have students create and share, I have, for the first time in years, recycled some of my plans from last year. I haven't had much to blog about.
PBL Update
Just recently, we started my PBL for this year. This week students are posting questions on Edmodo for our buddies to answer over in France. The only thing that I did differently this year was a team contract. I felt that this was a great way to have students buy in to the project, so that they all realized that they were in important part of the team. I also gave each group a folder. In this folder they will keep their team contract, and other documents. This is always a fun, but crazy couple of weeks. We'll see where the journey takes us this year.
Google Forms
This semester I am taking a grad class that is teaching and encouraging collaboration in the classroom. For our final assignment of the course, I am faced with the task of creating a learning activity which involves collaboration with the use of technology. What better way to have students collaborate than with Google Docs. Our school this year went Google. Each student has a Google Drive, which makes collaboration with Google even easier. While this assignment would be fine without a school wide Google domain, it's not essential.
It's always a goal for students to use the target language in authentic situations, but that is often one of the greatest challenges of a WL class. How to get students to use the language outside of those four walls?
We created a Google Form! The idea was to poll students world-wide on their thoughts and habits regarding school. (Our unit was wrapped around school, school supplies, telling time, etc.) Here are the steps that we followed:
1. Students came to groups with one question about school/ school habits/ school opinions.
2. Students shared their question and the groups decided on one question that they would like to ask.
3. I created a Google Form, as a class we titled it and I added the first two questions in order to show them how to create a Google Form. (We started with What is your age? and Where do you live?)
4. Each group accessed the link to our Google Form (which I posted onto our class group of Edmodo). Then, added their question.
-I had the Form on my Smart board and as questions were being posted we could make sure that there weren't any repeats and we could look at and correct grammar errors.
5. I posted the link on my website and sent it to as many teacher friends as I could in hopes that they could get their students to answer. --This is why having a broad PLN is important. I have French teacher connections around the world, and I contacted everyone one of them.
-I had wanted to post it as a project on epals.com, but they aren't starting any new projects right now. (That's a bummer!)
Infographs
If you haven't noticed, Infographs are the THING right now. They are the preferred method of getting information out there. They allow data to easily be presented through images. I decided that an extension of our Google Form would be for students to look at the data from our survey and use that information to create an infograph.
This part of our project will be done later next week. But, students will use http://www.easel.ly/ to create an infograph that measures the responses to the survey. They will pick five areas to showcase.
Here's the plan:
1. Students will access the link to the responses of the Google Form through an link on Edmodo.
2. Working with partners, students will determine 5 areas of the survey that they want to represent.
3. Students will create graphs or use other images available to visually represent the findings of our survey.
4. To submit their final Infograph, students will post the link on or class Edmodo page.
I'm still in the process of creating the Scoring Guide for the infograph of this assignment, but I will post it when I finish it.
I think this assignment will be great in order to reinforce learning. Students are using learning in an authentic way, plus they must read and make inferences with the results of the survey. What a great way for students to take their learning to the next level. I'm excited to see how it turns out.
