Collaborative Team project

So I've got a majority of the projects finally turned in, and I'm not sure if I didn't model a good final project or if the students simply missunderstood the goal of the project that Ms. Bucher, Ms. Enoch and I worked on. As a reminder, the kids were to choose a political issue, write a persuasive essay, find supporting statistics, and put it all together in a multimedia presentation in the form of a photostory or powerpoint. The 3 that did the powerpoint did great, listing sources and actually having persuasive text in their slides; however, the rest who chose to do a photostory really only had descriptive text and little to no persuasion or supportive statistics. I'll try to find two or three exemplars that I publish their work and maybe get some critiques from my listening audience.

Avid Training

So I went to an AVID pathways training last week (11/27 & 11/28) and our presenter reinforced some ideas: like TV sets the attention span of our students and we should look at doing some break up activity every 10-15 minutes. Some of the ideas he shared are doing a warm-up like a review of volume, then taking a sheet of paper and cutting it exactly in half and forming two different cylinders (by folding the hot dog and hamburger ways) and asking the students to "Vote with their feet" by saying the left side of the room is the short fat cylinder can hold more M&Ms and the right side of the room says the tall skinny cylinder can hold more M&Ms or those who stand in the middle think the both will hold equal amounts of M&Ms. After seeing the distribution toss out the "Brain" (often called the talking stick) and have people from the three groups make statements to persuade someone from the other groups to change their mind (of course the person who convinces another gets a prize). Then after every one's had the opportunity to bring someone over explain the Volume solutions.

Another example he gave was "4 corners." In the west corner is the walking trail, the North corner is one lane dirt road, the East corner is paved street and the South corner is the autobahn. Meaning the west is people who know nothing, the north knows a little, East has played with it but not in depth knowledge, South knows all there is to know. He gave the name "facebook" and we all moved. Then starting with the west we explained what we knew.

Project ideas

1. Lowering the drinking age
2. Decriminalizing marijuana
3. Fingerprinting students for use in schools - lunch, book check out, fines, etc
4. Uniforms in schools
5. Curfew laws
6. Religion in schools
7. Off campus Lunch
8. Creationism vs. Evolution being taught in schools
9. Use of technology in the classroom (or lack there of)
Should students be allowed to use their phones during class?
Should teachers send tests to thier students phones?
Does background music improve learning?
10. Healthcare - private personal coverage vs. global governmental coverage
11. Immigration - various issues abound here

Students should be allowed to generate their own topics with approval of instructor and it be in the boundaries of a policital issue with statistical persuasions either for or against the position.

Continuing the project

Here's the latest thoughts on continuing the project. We have a time line of before Christmas break. This week til Thursday Ms. Bucher is doing and introduction to research and what is a source. Thursday and Friday Ms. Enoch and I will show and have the students select their political topic to do research on. We'll divide time up among the three of us for research on from December 3 to the 12th and from the 13th to the 19th have them create their multimedia final project of a commercial, PowerPoint (type) presentation or short film. With student presentations on the 20th and the 21st.

10 math questions

So I'm trying to use an idea from a book by Lynne Kelly called "Challenging Minds." The idea is to have students answer questions that may or may not have answers in traditional resource places. The example they use is "What is an Apgar test?" the problem with the question is that I found an answer on google, which I believe is the primary resource for most people; however,the idea is that if a student had asked their mom or a recent mother they would be able to explain what a Apgar Test is. So for an introduction to the research/persuasion project we thought it would be best to find 10 questions each for Civics, Statistics, and Persuasion. I'll post comments for some of my ideas.

Adding on to the unit project

So the idea comes in that we need to help our students become better at projects, not only the resources to look at how to manage their time. I've collaborated with my team (Tonya and Patti Jo) about how we can work together to support eachother. So we reconfigured another project for GT kids. We're going to ask 20 or so questions from our respective fields and have the kids take the questions home to murr over (most probably set aside) then have them complete research with text sources only for one day and finally two days for internet research. The idea is that they realize that books and the internet are not their only resources for information. People too have knowledge and they are often the best resource we can find and trust.

End of term 1

So I had lots of great ideas and no time to implement. So here's my thought: term 2 work collaboratively with my team and create a team project in which we all have differing assignments/goals based upon the student position on a political idea or opinion. So I can keep track myself here are some possible ideas

1. Lowering the drinking age
2. Decriminalizing marijuana
3. Fingerprinting students for use in schools - lunch, book check out, fines, etc
4. Uniforms in schools
5. Curfew laws

Ideally a webquest can be set up for the students to explore these ideas and pick groups for themselves to work on a project that either supports or arguees against the statistics, the article or the claim itself. From there, I'd like to employ the use of Zoomerang and have the kids create a survey to see if the other students as a whole either agree or disagree with the claim.