Today our 2nd graders learned all about black bear habitats in Sleeping Bear Dunes through a virtual field trip. They video conferenced with a park ranger for a fun and interactive program!
Each month, we will feature one teacher from Glen Lake Community Schools who is providing innovating learning experiences for their students. The March teacher spotlight is Anna Wassa! She currently teaches Language Arts in the high school and her classes include English 9, English 11, Honors English 9, AP Language and Composition and Poetry. The innovative project we will be highlighting is from her 11th grade students. These students are studying the epic poem Beowulf. They were tasked with demonstrating in-depth inferences and thorough, thoughtful analysis of the themes occurring in different, specific sections of the text, through a creative video composition. Through their videos, students are able to bring life to their analysis with rich imagery and narration. The student videos will be viewed and discussed in class to further discover the overarching themes that flow through the text for a broader analysis of the entire poem. Below is a link to her learning goal and Marzano s...
What's more fun than animals dressed up and speaking Spanish? Señora Pina's 4th, 5th and 6th grade elementary Spanish students were able to do just this! These students were learning the first person tenses of the Spanish verbs "to be" and "to have". To practice their new learning, the students were able to pick an animal that they wanted to be. They found images of their chosen animal online, saved them to their iPads and imported the images into the app "Chatterpix". This fun app allows students to add their own voice recording to any image to make it "talk". The students spoke as if they were the animal to describe their characteristics in the first person. Check out the video below for a sampling of these projects. Buen trabajo estudiantes de español!
Here at Glen Lake, when we have conversations about using technology to support learning, our teachers use a rubric (the SAMR rubric) to evaluate where the technology usage falls on the scale. It boils down to if the tech is being used to do old things in old ways, old things in new ways, or new things in new ways. Projects will fall all along this continuum and that is okay. Even when students are using technology to do basic word processing or drill and practice problems, the functional benefits are apparent through either efficiency, practice targeted to student needs or increased engagement. Our goal is to have continuous improvement and push further up the scale each year. Our teachers are constantly learning, trying and sharing new ways to integrate technology to increase student achievement. The project we are highlighting in this week's blog post is definitely an example of doing new things in new ways . It comes from Karen Richard's biology students. It is a semeste...
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