An Audience Beyond the Teacher
As I was preparing a lesson on natural disasters for 3rd grade, I discovered an Advocate page on the Red Cross site asking people to write to their Senators to support legislation to establish a National Commission on Children and Disasters. Rather than writing typical form letters, I had each class create a simple, yet meaningful, video message to support this legislation.
The process was fairly simple. With support from the homeroom teacher, the students brainstormed ideas, illustrated the main points, wrote elaboration sentences, and practiced speaking their parts. I scanned the images and imported them to Microsoft Photo Story 3. I used ccMixter, a site featuring community music licensed under Creative Commons, for background music and then recorded student voices over the images. Once completed, the videos were posted on TeacherTube. For the final step, the students drafted, revised, and edited an email letter to be sent to NYS members of Congress with links to the posted videos.
Download Video by Mrs. Erbland’s Class
Download Video by Mrs. McDonnell’s Class
Download Video by Mrs. Pennock’s Class
What other ideas do you have to help us continue to provide experiences for our students to share their work with audiences beyond the classroom teachers?
on January 14th, 2008 at 11:32 pm
Wendy, I want to thank you for pushing me in new directions. My students were excited and able to feel the importance of the audience for their work. I am proud to collaborate with you!
Amy
on January 15th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Wendy,
I cannot tell you how much the MST lab has changed the way I teach. I am more enthusiastic than I have ever been and it is rubbing off on my students. You are giving me the opportunity to watch, on a daily basis, inquiry based learning using technology. Both of these have “hooked” my students. They ask daily when we are going to put something else on the web. Whenever we have a writing project to do they want to knwo if it might go on the web. You have helped me to change the way my students look at the tasks they are asked to do. Each day is a new experience and my students and I can’t wait to come to school each day and see what new and different ways we can use technology to share what we are learning.
on January 17th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
This project was an amazing opportunity for students to think critically about a real-world problem. This, in itself, generated intrinsic motivation. The technology involved excited students further and allowed them all to stretch their thinking on how they, at 8 years old, can change the world!
on January 20th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
What amazing work the children (and teachers) did on this project! This inquiry based lesson was both engaging and important. Children may look back on this in years to come marking it as their first attempt at writing for the world.