(Reflection Post 3 CoETaIL Course 5)

We’re almost at the end of our Grade 5 PSA making adventure for our Sustainability Unit – Time to take action!

Our proposed timeline was:

• 1 x session to Investigate
• 2-4 x sessions to Plan  (invest the majority of your time in this stage – the better prepared your students are in this storyboard phase, the better the creation process will be)
• 1-2 sessions to Create
• 1 x session to Peer Review
• 1 x session to Reflect

In reality it looked a lot different! (But in a good, learning curve kinda way!)  Sessions were generally 45 minutes long.

• 3 x sessions to Investigate
  Thanks to my good friend Jamin who suggested we watch the model PSAs and build our own success criteria together! Fantastic idea – it worked a treat and really gave everyone some clear goals and guidelines plus ownership of what was going to be important in our PSAs.
• 6 x sessions to Plan
  We broke the storyboard plan down into  3 parts:  3 images for what the problem was, 3 images for causes and effects, 3 images for Action Plan – this worked really well, narrow enough for some of the more struggling learners and encouraged more articulate learners to be concise and clear!
• 4 sessions to Create
  We did not experience any problems during the create sessions but a few of my brave (because they took on this project with such commitment), and enthusiastic (because of the total willingness to take this kind of project on) colleagues experienced some heartaches and sheer frustration moments.  This part of the project, therefore will be reworked, so that next year some of those frustrations will be eliminated.
• 2 sessions to Peer Review
  Our school faced 2 days of closure towards the end of our project – so I modified our review part simply because of time constraints – we exported our iMovie projects without the peer review and are doing the peer-review more as a feedback for the next time we do a project that involves multimedia.  I’ll share with you the google doc we used to collate all our feedback for each other, in my next post

We have our Reflection session still to complete – Each PSA will be posted on the creator’s blog and a reflection paragraph – based on the feedback received, teacher feedback and own personal feelings & comments, will be written.  This will probably be a homework assignment rather than a class session.

Overall I’m really impressed with the learning of iMovie that my students achieved.  I’m impressed with their overall products, even though a lot of them realise that they should have paid more attention to the polish part of their project.  For the most part, their messages were clear and concise and their action plans doable.  Let’s hope that their messages will be heard and differences will be made.

If you have time to check them out I’d really appreciate it and so would my students.  All 12 projects can be found on techcoachisb’s YouTube channel - plus we will be featuring one at a time on our classroom blog too!