Project: The students were given the task to write a narrative story. Grade 3/4’s theme was adventure and the grade 5/6’s theme was mystery. We had covered the two writing traits - Ideas and Organization and therefore that was our focus for this writing task. Students took their stories through the writing process and included a hand drawn cover page for their published story. Hollywood then called and was looking to turn their stories into a big screen production. We kicked this excitement off with a PowerPoint presentation sharing the details of their assignment. Students used the iMovie app to create movie trailers
promoting their stories. We hosted a red carpet event – Kenaston Golden Globes where we viewed all of the movie trailers and a variety of awards were handed out. The day was full of excitement with everyone dressed up in their formal wear. Popcorn and drinks were served during the movie premier. Everyone was pleased to receive a Golden Globe Award.

Summary I began my 21st Century journey this year hoping to create a classroom blog. My main goal was to allow parents a glimpse into their child’s daily life at school. I pictured students blogging daily about what we were up to in class and parents commenting and asking questions regularly. This, unfortunately, was not the case. I encountered problem after problem until the idea just fizzled by the wayside. So, on to the next idea! A few years ago, I attended a session by a teacher who was doing stop-motion animation with her class. I latched onto that idea and quickly purchased the iMotion app. I started making videos with my five year old son (who loved it!!!) and soon felt comfortable enough to introduce the technology to my class. The students were very excited to try it! We had only one problem… we only had one ipad. Several students got the opportunity to create a stop-motion animation as part of a book report project. (They did a stop-motion animation in place of creating a diorama.) However, most students did not get a chance to try it due to time limitations with only one ipad. Out of the students who did not get to create a stop-motion animation, a couple of them asked if they could create a digital diorama using Minecraft. Several other students overheard and wanted to do one too. I was curious to see what they would do so I allowed them to try it. The results were fantastic!!! We connected each students’ personal device to the SmartBoard to present their dioramas to the rest of the class. (We learned that we can’t use the airwatch to have a “live” diorama on the SmartBoard, but we fixed that problem by taking still pictures (screenshots) of the scene and displaying it that way.)

Our class read the novel, “Where the Red Fern Grows” . As a final assessment for
the novel study I created a choice board which gave students twelve different
options for their final project. Choices were created with student interest in
mind. We went through the various choices and rubric as a class. The assessment
rubric was created using the SunWest Rubric 1-5 language (key words).