On-line posters

Next year I’ll be doing something new: all of our fourth grade teachers will be looping up to fifth grade, keeping our same classes that we’ve had this year. I’m very excited about this for a number of reasons. I’ve been in fourth grade for thirteen years, and I’m feeling like I need a curriculum change, and I’m glad I’m moving up as I like the complexity of the content as the grades move up. I’m also happy to be spending another year with these kids; we’ve had a great group and I’m glad I can continue on with them.

That being said, I know that I need to mix things up a bit for next year, and provide new opportunities for these students so that it doesn’t seem like a complete repeat of fourth grade. One area I plan to have kids use more often is technology in the classroom.  They need to be able to comfortably word process a page-length document by the end of fifth grade, and I know that much of their work in middle school will be done and turned in on computers, so I want to be sure that they’ve had opportunities to do that in my classroom before moving on.

I also want to hit the ground running in the fall, since I don’t have to take all the time to get to know them like I have all the other years, and to that end, I’ve started to introduce some things that we can practice now, and then hopefully just review a bit before putting it into independent practice in September.

One project we’ve tried is making multi-media posters using our district’s Discovery Education account. Each student has a user name and password, and once they log on, they can begin to use some of the tools Discovery Ed has. I had my students  make multi-media posters about the Dust Bowl, since we had just read a nonfiction text in guided reading. Using the Board Builder program, students were able to include text boxes, still photos, and maybe best of all, short movies from the Discovery Ed collection, all to give the best information they could about the Dust Bowl.

The posters are far from perfect, but the students were very engaged each time they had a chance to work on them. They especially liked selecting movies (no surprises there), and many included more than would be ideal on their posters. It would be great to have them look at each other’s posters and offer suggestions, and I may get to that this spring, but that would be a definite skill to practice in the fall.  They were also quick to pick up the basics, and helped each other out, making it much easier for me to get around to help on more difficult tasks. They could even access this account from home, and a few students did that.

I’m including a couple of examples of posters below; there could be all kinds of discussions about how effective or distracting the backgrounds are, if there is enough information in the text boxes, and what else is needed to make the poster more easily understood. But it’s a start for now, and will definitely be an option for “showing what you know” in the fall.