As mentioned in previous posts, our whole 5th Grade team willingly took on a Science/Social Studies technology rich project for our Sustainability Unit of Study.

Using iMovie, every 5th grade student, either in a group, pair or individually, created a Public Service Announcement (more commonly known as a PSA) to demonstrate their knowledge of a problem of sustainability, how that problem continues to be a problem if we don’t take action, and how we can take action.

Overall the PSAs were a huge success.  The technology piece was, at times, frustrating for different classes, but the quality of the PSAs and my student’s ability to express what they learned and how they can made a difference, impresses me.

Now it’s time to reflect on my role in this project.

The rubric used for the teacher in this project can be found here.

I feel that I’m meeting the redefinition criteria of the rubric in all areas.

One particular strength I have, is being able to use “just-in-time” learning during any use of technology. I use the strengths of students to help other students and my class knows that I do not know everything – we all help each other.  Hanging in our classroom is our Tech Experts Chart.  As we use particular tools during the year, students have the opportunity to volunteer as experts for that tool.  They are the “go to” people when you don’t know how to do something, not me, them!  This works brilliantly and would have to be one of the best things I have ever used in the classroom.

Another strength that I personally believe you need if you are using technology in the classroom is calmness.  We don’t panic or get stressed out when things don’t go quite right.  I am a firm believer in modelling this to your students at all times, so that they in turn model calmness when things don’t work out the way they want.  We’ve dealt with “lost work”, corrupt files, the spinning colour wheel and a raft of other things that often go wrong when using laptops in the classroom.  Nobody ended up in tears, nobody tore their hair out and everyone successfully completed their PSA and has it uploaded to YouTube.   (You can watch all 12 of our PSAs from here).

The Sustainability Unit will be getting some tweaks here and there as we reflect on the whole unit as a team.  There’s already some things I’d like to add to make it easier for next year but that’s for another post!

Today we spent a 45 minute session watching and peer-reviewing each others’ completed PSAs.  Unfortunately, due to two days of closure right before our Songkran break, we needed to export our iMovie projects to a finished product BEFORE a peer-review.  I would be extremely hesitant to export again before a peer-review.   The conversations and feedback that were taking place in the classroom during this session was awesome and I could see the realisation of mistakes on student’s faces – it was disappointing for me and for them in not to be able to give them class time to go back, refine, reedit and re-polish their projects.

Before this session, we had watched all of the PSAs, on the big screen, as a showcase, clapping and cheering, with no commenting or reviewing – just for sheer celebration of hard work and a finished project.  This I recommend as it’s fantastic just to enjoy the finished product and take a breather from all the hard work without the creators feeling that their work is straight away, under the microscope.

I created a google doc and shared it with my all of my students prior to this session:

This was a brilliant idea!  All our feedback was on one document.  We went through the document first and talked about answering the questions based only on what you saw and heard in the PSA.  We also decided that you need to watch the PSA at least 3 times – each time concentrating on a different section (content, polish or copyright) at a time.  We also went through, group by group and added the title of the PSA and the peer reviewers names to their section of the document first.  This was so that everyone was adding their feedback in the right place.  Each group of 4 had two laptops – one with the google doc open, the other with YouTube open to watch the PSA.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/room18tis/4558788981/

We had groups of 4 (either made up from each pair of creators, or two single creators teamed up with a pair of creators).  We had 4 individual projects and 8 pair projects to review).

Today, each group reviewed 1 PSA each.  In our next review session, we will probably review one more, with some groups reviewing two more.  I expect that the reviewing will be much quicker as they will all know what they’re looking and listening for.

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!

In pairs or as individuals, our students will be creating PSAs (Public Service Announcements).They will need to analyze one aspect of their family’s environmental impact (i.e. electricity, water usage, garbage, paper usage, etc), research why there is such an impact and create an action plan with their own innovative ways to diminish that impact in order to create a preferable future. The PSA will make a compelling recommendation for change based on evidence (that includes written, oral and visual aspects) and that includes specific actions to take in order to improve their family’s environmental impact.

The Grade 5 CoETaIL cohorts, Teresa, Robin, Dan and myself, along with our fellow Grade 5 team members, Jim, Ali, and Sandra have put together this culminating project for our integrated Science/Social Studies Environment/Sustainability unit which we are piloting for the first time this year.

As our Science sessions come to an end, we are about to begin the Social Studies Culminating Project for Sustainability.  This side of the unit has been a challenge for us all.  The Grade 5 team has done a fabulous job so far of integrating tech tools to help their students learn about Sustainability as well as learning some new tech skills.  It’s not only the students who are learning – their teachers have been learning right along side them too.  Our final project will see the use of technology to help us spread our message about taking action and making a sustainable difference.

There will be 4 further posts on this blog, for Course 5 of CoETaIL,  reflecting on the journey embedding technology and whether it makes a difference to student learning as we progress through this specific project.

Below is the planning that we have created to meet the needs of our CoETaIL requirements: