Week of April 14, 2008

Yay! Testing is over and we can get back to our normal schedules.

This week was spent in our 7th Grade Social Studies classroom. The students have been learning about U.S. immigration. They studied about places where different people had immigrated from and where and how they entered the country.

As a culminating activity to the lessons. the teacher usually has the students create immigrant scrapbooks. The students are assigned a country to immigrate from and write letters, find pictures, and write about contributions to the United States from those countries. They write and cut and then paste it all onto to construction paper. This year we did it all digitally!!

I created a wiki using Wikispaces for Papago Social Studies. The home page contained the information the students needed to completed their project - instructions, a checksheet and some pre-selected websites. I also created a sample page so that they could visualize what their wiki page would look like when completed.

The students researched their immigrant group, created their own page, wrote their letters, and added graphics with annotations. You can view their wiki pages at PapagoSocialStudies.

This was their first experience at using this type of Web 2.0 tool. Hopefully we can add to their wiki experience soon!

I also did a PowerPoint training with the reading coaches on Friday. We covered a variety of things such as giving effective presentations, adding video and audio, adding backgrounds, using notes, and printing handouts. Several of them are anxious to get creative!