Published!

I received an email forwarded from Dr. Laura Bardroff Zieger stating that our "paper has been accepted for publication in The Journal of Interactive Learning Research (JILR)"!  JILR publishes papers related to the underlying theory, design, implementation, effectiveness, and impact on education and training of interactive learning environments.  The paper we co-authored was based on my thesis.  I'll post more info when the new issue comes out!

Meso-American Digital Posters

Last week my 6th grade students each created an interactive digital poster to highlight the accomplishments and history of one of the cultures of the ancient America’s (e.g., Mayan, Aztec, Inca, Mound Builder, Pueblo, Anasazi).  Their display included a variety of components to give an accurate representation of the culture they researched.  Students researched information on a library cart prepared by our media specialist.  Research links were socially bookmarked on my Delicious.com account.

The culminating activity of the project was created using the class Glogster accounts.  A Glog is an interactive visual platform in which users create a “poster or web page” containing multimedia elements including: text, audio, video, images, graphics, drawings, and data.  The required project components included a embedding a text paragraph, creating a sound recording, uploading a Discovery Streaming video clip, and other pictures and graphics that explain/describe the culture, including a map of the region.

Click the picture below to see a student example (or, click here: edu.glogster.com/the-aztecs).  Don't forget to click the embedded pictures, click the play button on the picture of the sun, and press play on the video player!

Playing with Media/Remixing History

My 7th grade's 13 Colonies project-based learning (PBL) assignment culminated in students using Photo Story 3 to create digital story TV commercials about each of their team's assigned colony.   

 

This project was later featured on the Playing with Media website: http://share.playingwithmedia.com/2011/10/26/come-to-our-colony-new-amsterdam/.   

The project was also featured this week at the “Remixing History” workshop, held in San Bernardino, CA: https://sites.google.com/site/remixhistory/.   

All of the videos were uploaded to our class YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/SuperSocialStudies.  Feel free to view them and forward them along to help them "go viral!"