iMovie

Learning Through Heritage

While I was at the Apple Distinguished Educators training in November, we worked on our Wisdom Lost – Wisdom Found wiki and project in hopes that it carry through to our respective schools. After sharing the project with my colleagues, we decided to model the Journeys Heritage Project after Wisdom-Lost, Wisdom-Found. The Enduring Understanding for the unit tell you what we want students to take with them:

There are many types of journeys
Everything we do has an impact on ourselves and on our environment
Our past shapes our present and our future
Humans continually seek knowledge

The Journeys unit wrapped up last week with a culminating project about each student’s heritage. Each and every student used iMovie to create a digital story about their heritage and discussed and learned more about their family, environment, nationality and ethnicity. Over and over again, students made connections that ran deep into their heritage. They were insightful young adults and definitely are making their first steps towards becoming high school students. It always seems to happen around January and this project is proof of their growth throughout this unit of study. Thanks to Ms Muench, Dr. Brown, Mr. Small and Mr. Gilli for organizing this project with the students and for being committed to teaching the technology skills to support the student learning.

I hope you enjoy Tracy’s example!

Science Rules!

ngo1 I am constantly amazed by the students in our schools. We’ve all heard the age old adage, “If you give an inch, they’ll take a mile…” Well, we have our 8th graders an inch and many of them took it the mile. Over the past month, students have been creating their own Environmental NGO. The students did a GREAT job of honoring our host country of China and focused their NGOs on Air Pollution, Deforestation, Desertification, Energy, Waste and Water Pollution.

One hundred and fifty students paired up and worked collaboratively across two teams. I created a wiki page for them that had the requirements of the project and I provided them with several screencasts showing how to link to pages outside and inside the wiki, create a table of contents, and create RSS feeds. They just needed the tools though… the brains, the meat of the project had to come from them! I gave them the inch and they took the mile!!!

Here’s an example of a pretty darn good wiki that one of my groups created… and a video that another group created. I’m motivated! Great work 8th graders!