4th Grade Construction

Final Project Screencast

cwilsie — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:17:22 +0000

Evaluation

cwilsie — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:49:09 +0000

My goals are:

Give students a first look at wikis and some practice using one.
Express in writing support for their ideas about their own work and others’.
Read a non-fiction article and add text features based on what they believe the main idea is.

How will you know if this site is helping your users reach the objectives you’ve defined for them?

I will be looking for thoughtful responses and I will be looking for them to be supporting their contributions in the history log and discussion threads. Supporting their ideas — that will be the thing I stress over and over and over — because most 4th graders are just not that good at it. I think that they will be more motivated to make good points knowing that it is on a wiki and that their peers will be reading what they write. I don’t expect them to have much trouble editing an existing wiki page — I think the simplicity of this site serves as a good opportunity for them to become familiar with wikis. Since there are six different articles and the students are going to rotate through all of them, I will have many opportunities for giving feedback if they do have trouble with any parts of the project. I would expect as they rotate through each article that their contributions would improve each time, and that discussions would increase.

Implementation

cwilsie — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 02:55:42 +0000

How will you introduce this to the class? The non-fiction reading skill of using titles, subtitles, etc. to get to the main idea of an article will be worked on in class through shared reading. I will also do shared readings where the text features are covered up and we as a group come up with them. The wiki project will be an extension of what we are doing in class (I do, we do, you do). By the time they get to the wiki, they will know what to do and can focus on using the wiki. I will introduce the wiki whole class and do a demonstration, much like the screencasts on the home page. Probably at first they will try this in class, but later it can be used for homework as well.
What do you have to do to get permission from the powers-that-be at your school? Luckily, my administrator is very supportive when it comes to using technology in the classroom. He is very much interested in developing a 21th century school. The parents and PTA are also on board with this. In fact, the money from the main fund raiser last year was earmarked for more computers (and this was after just getting two laptop carts at the beginning of the year). The PTA also arranged a seminar led by a former FBI agent on how to keep kids safe on the internet. So the support is there at my site! Many of my students had email accounts last year, so hopefully this year there will be some as well. For the ones that don’t, I will create accounts for them using the method Matt shared with our class (in fact I already have one generic student email created and a member of the wiki). I will have them all add their pictures (using photo booth) so that I will know who is who and I am not constantly looking up their class number.

Final Project

cwilsie — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 02:20:16 +0000

Development

cwilsie — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 01:54:04 +0000

What tools (or combination of tools) will you use to support the site? I plan to include an explicit home page (protected) of what I expect them to do and how to do it. I will also have screencast tutorials of how to edit their page and how to leave comments. There will be a page for each student (Article 2A, 2B, etc.) and they will be grouped together so that it will be easy to find the other students that read the same article.

What customizations will you need to do to your site? Since this is somewhat of an “intro to wikis” project, their pages are already full of writing and all they will need to do is edit. Where they need to edit and what they need to add is right there on the page for them so that all they have to do is click edit, highlight and type. I want them to understand how to do the editing, but what I am really interested in is their writing their thinking in the history log and in the discussion thread. There will also be an example article (from the video) for them to explore in and use as….well, an example! Hello!

Are you happy with how well it turned out? I think it looks good, it is very user-friendly…my screencasts could be a little slicker, but overall I would say I am very pleased with how it turned out — especially for what it is intended for.

Design

cwilsie — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 22:15:25 +0000

What do you want users to be able to do when they visit this site? I want them to go to the Home page for directions for what they are supposed to do, see an example of how to do it, and links to articles with text features. I want them to find their assigned article, read for the main idea of it as a whole and of the different sections. Then I want them to edit the article by adding a title, a subtitle, headings, and a caption for the picture. They need to explain their decisions for each in the history log. Once they have completed their own article, they will visit other students’ pages that read the same article. They will then use the discussion thread to comment on the text features the others came up with.

Is it a recurring effort, or a one-time project? Since five students will be reading the same article and there are six different articles in all, all the students could rotate through all the articles. This format could be repeated in another context as well. I see this project as being a good entry-level activity to wikis.

Analysis

cwilsie — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:46:54 +0000

Who are your users? I am creating this project for my fourth grade class (9-10 year olds). I should have approximately 30 students in my class. I expect that they will have varying computer and typing skills, although most kids at my site have computers at home. The majority of them are English speakers.

What do you want them to be able to do as a result of using your web site? I want my students to be able to read an article, think about the main idea of it (and it’s different sections) and add text features (titles, subtitles, headings, captions) to it through the wiki. I want them to also think critically about other classmates’ suggested text features, and comment on them through the wiki’s discussion.

What have others done that is similar? I have not seen any other projects similar to this one. Most of the wikis I’ve seen have the students doing more writing than I plan to. In fact, all of the pages will be set up for them with just a little editing.

What performance drivers might prevent them from learning with this tool? (skills/knowledge, motivation, environment, incentive) One concern is computer and typing skills – navigating the site. I plan to have the project heavily scaffolded. They will not actually be doing a lot of editing on the pages. Mostly I hope to see good ideas for text features that demonstrate an understanding of the main idea of the article. This brings up another concern — reading ability. Most of the kids at my school read at grade level; I plan to include less challenging articles for struggling readers. They may have trouble supporting their comments in discussion threads. Being polite when commenting on each others’ contributions will also need to be addressed.

Project Overview

cwilsie — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 01:18:03 +0000

An important skill for fourth grade students reading non-fiction articles is effectively using titles, subtitles, headings, and captions. These text features should be used to help them understand what they are reading and to get to the main idea of an article. Sometimes these text features are not as helpful as they should be, so students also need to think about them critically. A lesson I’ve done in the past is to have students read articles with the title, subtitle, headings, and captions covered up. Then we discuss what we think it is mostly about and then we come up with the text features ourselves. Different ideas are given and discussed, then we come up with a consensus and compare them with the author’s.

Doing this lesson through a wiki would give all the students the opportunity to contribute ideas and give them a chance to read others’ ideas, reflect, and comment on them.

Sedona Video

cwilsie — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 17:49:43 +0000

Misty recommended Animoto, so I checked it out and it’s very easy and pretty cool.

Podcasting in Sedona

cwilsie — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:14:55 +0000

Well, between checking in with my parents in San Diego (my dad has had a kidney stone removed yesterday and his gall bladder removed today) and trying to be on vacation with my family here in Sedona, I have gotten a little work done (emphasis on “little”). I will be behind on this week’s posts, but I expect to have those caught up by class on Saturday, or shortly thereafter.

I did manage to set up a Gcast account and do a couple of podcasts with my cell phone…pretty cool!

aug_6__2008_phone_call1

I haven’t been able to get it in a nice box like Karl’s, but I haven’t had much time to figure it out. I also have done my first podcast, so here it is…

Slide Rock

I will also be posting info on my final project very soon.