To see our great task from IO: Put Yourself in the Picture
https://www.iomembership.com/projects/showcase/index.jsf
Technologically, I acquired no new skills from the project but that was actually a function of how I decided to complete the project. We divided up our duties based on our previous skills, mine being research and writing from my social studies teacher background. As a group project, that almost became a weakness because we certainly didn't all learn the same things nor did we all acquire the same skills from the project. While that is the heart of personalization, it also allowed us to avoid new learning!
The technology was somewhat incidental though, providing the opportunity to explore different tools, like photoshop or gimp but it would be a particularly time consuming task. The best use of technology was where we could use the internet for research, and finding valid sources and citing them correctly. So while the technology use in this task was interesting, it certainly wasn't perfect.
Our task was interesting because the original idea was extremely creative but lacked parameters to really make it a practical, achievable task. That came out in our intial discussions around how to accomplish this task, how wide open it was in terms of the images we could find and our ability to judge if a picture was historically signifigant. At every level it would be important to provide very specific instructions and preparation in order for this project to be well recieved in a classroom. Means to do this could include giving a collection of pictures for students to use, doing lessons on citation and validity before this and smaller taks with photoshop/gimp to ensure that the students have sufficient skills to complete the task beforehand.
My biggest weakness to the group I would say is a lack of coordination. While my group were emailing the final draft and changes to one another, I found myself unable to look at a screen due to some eye testing that left me 'snow blind' for a good eight hours. Dispite having cell phone numbers, emails, and the space on the moodle, I was still unable to contribute much during this final phase of the project.
All in all though, it was a very engaging task because it was given immediacy by looking at an event, a moment in time and looking at it from a personal prespective. Tweaking this project to perhaps be a multistep, indepedent or in pairs project would probably make it a lot more successful - But as with all lessons out there you need to adapt them to your students, subject and relationship with your students.
You will need to share with the class how you have added the feeds that appear at the right to your blog. Looks great.
ReplyDeleteHaving the skills to do the tech piece could be a hinderance if the object of the assignment is to teach the kids how to use the technology. If it is to analyze the big questions that come about from the results of doing the task, then it is not as big a deal. So, the question could be would you want to group kids in such a way that one of the kids already knows the tech skill? Is there an advantage to doing this? disadvantage? Maybe this is more of an individual type assignment? Or are there lessons to be learned by having kids work it out together. I like the idea of selecting topics beforehand,I am not so sure if I would go so far as to select the images for the kids. But, that is why we are all teachers, we all look at this with our own practice in mind. Good job.