Collaborative Project Review

This year has been an exciting journey for me as both a teacher and a student of technology use in the classroom. As May comes to a close, I find that the end of the year is bittersweet. Although it is always hard to say goodbye for the summer, it is always comforting to reflect on all the progress the students have made throughout the year.

As we finished the last few weeks of school, we were able to wrap up a few collaborative projects that we had been working on. In addition to the collaborative projects we completed in March, we completed a few more projects in April and May. These projects included:

• Parts of a Plant (with Ms. Lopez’ Kindergarten class) For this project the students illustrated pictures and wrote about what they learned about plants. Ms. Lopez created a video with her students and posted it on her blog. A few of my students then responded to the video by leaving comments on her class blog. I also had a few students create a podcast about the purpose of each part of a plant and post it on our class blog.

http://melissagarcia.podbean.com/mf/web/kjsive/PlantGroupNEWExport.mp3

• Information Paragraphs (with Mrs. Martinez’ 1st Grade class) In order to introduce this project I created a flipchart using ActivInspire and used resources from http://www.brainpopjr.com/. The students then researched and wrote an information paragraph about a given animal. The students then published their paragraphs using Microsoft Word before posting them to our class blog. For her part of the project, Mrs. Martinez took pictures of her students’ work and then recorded her students reading their work using Audacity. She and I worked together to create a few podcasts.
  
• Friendly Letters (with Mrs. Waheed’s 2nd Grade class) Mrs. Waheed’s class began by creating Voicethreads of their friendly letters to my students. My students then responded by posting their own friendly letters on Mrs. Waheed’s class blog. http://mrswaheedroom28.blogspot.com/

In order to manage all of these collaborative projects I chose to divide the work and allow the students to choose if they would like to post a friendly letter to a blog, create a podcast, or post a comment to a blog. By allowing the students to select the type of technology they wished to use, they were able to review and help each other complete the assignments.