Today was the beginning of a great extended project, Method27. The entire project will be focused around matter. At the conclusion of the project, it is our goal for the students to design experiments that will help others determine if they are dealing with solids, liquids, or gases. I am working with Brittney Royal, 3rd Grade at Carver Elementary, over the next few weeks on building and modeling 21st Century Skills. Throughout the lessons the students will be learning how to research, conduct experiments, design experiments, analyze data, and work collaboratively.
Review of Day 1 Activities:
Before visiting the classroom I built a website and a series of Google Docs that the students will use to enter the information they find during the research process. While the groups were determined by the teacher, each group has a leader and the group determined the roles of each member.
The students met as a group to come up with a team name and record the members of the group on the GoogleDoc.
The students used their group’s GoogleDoc and a set of links 1 to compose the definitions of solids, liquids, and gases. GoogleDocs allow multiple users to enter information on the same document at the same time. Google Docs are great for online communication and collaboration.
Next week’s goals:
We will complete our first experiment next week. We are going to work on making hypotheses and conclusions. After the experiment is complete, the students will be researching the science behind what took place during the experiment.
Links were given to them to help expedited the initial research period. ↩
The Messing with the MacGuffin assignment through ds106 was a lot of fun. Short and simple. I used a list of 50 top movie one-liners to help get my memory going. This could easily be applied to a K-12 classroom as well. Students could easily change one main line in a story and describe the direction that the story will take with the new line of dialogue. Tim Owens has created a perfect example using Harry Potter, http://www.timmmmyboy.com/2011/09/sorting-hat/.
My dialogue change is from Dr. No, the first James Bond movie. It is the first place that we were introduced to “Bond, James Bond”. I am pretty sure his name helped build his image.
Today’s The Daily Create asks users to take a color photo and make it black and white. I took 2 shots of the Washington Monument and changed the color setting in iPhoto.
Being that 2012 is a mudslinging election year, I am officially joining the campaign1 for Angry Birds to be on every device possible. I know it is a game, but since when are games banned from classrooms, especially strategy games?2 Out of all of the apps and potential I have my devices, Angry Birds draws me in every time. I am OK with this addiction. It is not just a game in which you hurl colorful birds towards cowardly and sometimes awkwardly dressed pigs. In order to receive full credit for destroying the pigs dream of world domination, you have to do some serious thinking. The popularity of Angry Birds will help teachers introduce different types of projects that will be used throughout the school year. Here are some ideas for using Angry Birds in your classroom.
A level a day:
Classroom teachers, especially at the elementary level, have daily morning work assignments. These assignments usually include a daily math or language arts problem. Why not include a screen shot of a level of Angry Birds? Look it as a puzzle instead of a game. The students could write the directions, or sketch, what they think would be the best order to complete the level with the highest score possible. Because it usually takes more than one bird to complete a level, the students have to think a couple of steps ahead. Teaching the students to think ahead is not just a skill that is needed to be successful at this game, but it is important skill to have in many academic areas and life. If you have an interactive whiteboard, this would be great way for kids to display their ideas for a successful high score. There are more than enough levels to do one a day.
Language Arts:
I see a lot of potential for using Angry Birds in Language Arts. I would love for there to be a Three Little Pigs: Pigs vs Birds. Sure the Big Bad Wolf couldn’t blow the houses down, but the individual characteristics of each bird could certainly get the job done.
Since each of the birds has it’s own personality, biographies are another potential way to incorporate Angry Birds into writing. Unleashing students to document the life stories of the birds would be an entertaining read.
The 4 Icon Challenge originated from the DS106 class offered at the University of Mary Washington. The 4 Icon Challenges makes creators think about how they can summarize a story, book, movie, or in this case a game using just four icons. This is a tough task for many students, but it can be practiced using stories that they are already familiar with like The Three Little Pigs or Angry Birds.
Art and Language Arts can go hand-in-hand with Minimalist Movie Posters, also a potential DS106 assignment. Minimalist Movie Posters make students streamline a summary from four icons to one overall theme. This will challenge students to truly think critically about the what they read or watched in order for one clean poster to be created. Because the posters are meant to be minimalist, great art skills aren’t required. Again this idea can be used for topics (including historical events), stories, novels, and movies that are studied in your classroom.
Science:
There are many different ways to use Angry Birds in science. There are topics, such as physics, that I have no business talking about that can integrate the use of Angry Birds. The scientific method and the skills of data collection, data analysis, and experimentation can be practiced with the use of Angry Birds. There are videos and links below that will take you to examples of the use of Angry Birds in science.
Having just worked with 5th graders on mean, median, mode, and range, Angry Birds would be a great way to study these topics. However, since the scores generated on certain levels can be quite high, a calculator or spreadsheet that uses formulas, may be a handy tool to have available. Students could find the average number of points scored by each bird. The mean, median, mode, and range of each class member’s attempt is another potential activity. Older students could determine the speed that the birds reach during their flights.
While I know that the chances of seeing Angry Birds in every classroom across the country is low, the potential is there for a couple of educators to use it effectively in their classroom. Just the mention of Angry Birds in a Kindergarten classroom generated cheers and excitement, why not sneak some learning in….
This lesson was done in Cheryl Ives’s 4th grade class at Glen Allen Elementary. The lesson has been submitted to Henrico 21 for the 2011-2012 school year. In my opinion, this project is a great example on how to integrate multiple subjects and technology into a lesson.
Summary from Cheryl Ives’s Henrico 21 Lesson Plan:
After completing our studies of Jamestown (VS3a-g), the students were challenged with creating video segments that would cover the topics that were studied in our unit. The segments covered topics that included John Smith, Christopher Newport’s fleet, and Tobacco. The students created scripts, that were written in first-person, based on the study materials provided to them and facts that they have discovered while doing their own research. The students had to find and create props and costumes that will help the audience recognize the topic they were speaking about. The filming and editing of the final video product was organized and completed by the students in the classroom. This project allowed the kids be creative and show their personalities in their work while expanding their knowledge of Jamestown.
Today was the beginning of a great extended project, Method27. The entire project will be focused around matter. At the conclusion of the project, it is our goal for the students to design experiments that will help others determine if they are dealing with solids, liquids, or gases. I am working with Brittney Royal, 3rd Grade at Carver Elementary, over the next few weeks on building and modeling 21st Century Skills. Throughout the lessons the students will be learning how to research, conduct experiments, design experiments, analyze data, and work collaboratively.
