Curating Student Work

Post 20 on the TeachThought 30-Day Blogging Challenge: How do you curate student work–or help them do it themselves?

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The prompt for this post has my head spinning in a variety of directions. I’ll share some examples of how I curate student work in my role as Technology Integration Specialist. I also have ideas for what I’d do if I were a classroom teacher.

We have carts of shared iPads in our two school buildings. Students create a variety of projects that they then want to share with others. We created YouTube accounts for the carts and use the YouTube channels as a location to upload and store video-based projects. From there, students can get the link or embed code to share their projects with others in blogs or via email.

Last year we did an integrated project around the time of the Olympics. Students created short videos and then linked to them using the Aurasma app and augmented reality. That was tons of fun and a new way to share our learning. I wrote about that here.

If I were a classroom teacher, I’d definitely suggest that students share their work via their own blogs. It’s a perfect place to curate and share, as well as receive feedback and comments from others. Another tool that would be highly effective for curating and sharing their work would be ePortfolios. We have a few teams exploring different models and tools for ePortfolios this year and I am excited to with them and support that effort.

Finally, the arrival of Google Classroom has positively impacted how teachers and students curate work. I’ve already received very positive feedback from teachers using Classroom and from parents as well. I look forward to seeing how it evolves.

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Image: creative commons licensed (BY-NC-ND) flickr photo by krissen: http://flickr.com/photos/krissen/8689944802

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Recent Reflections

Wow- It’s been a month since my last post and I don’t know where the time went!

Here are a few things that have been happening:

Theme Week- Each year our building with 3rd-8th graders has a Theme Week hosted by the related arts teachers (Music, Art, P.E.) and the World Language teachers. Instead of students going to those classes, they go to a few workshops based on a central theme – this year it was the Olympics. Other adults in the building pitch in to make the groups smaller and the offerings larger. The tech integration team did a workshop using Augmented Reality this year. We only had our groups for one session, about 70 minutes. In that time, students created short videos about an Olympic sport, athlete, or country. Then they selected a trigger image and set it up in the Aurasma app on the iPads.

Some of the Olympic trigger images used to access the videos students made.

Voila! Now there are trigger images all over the school that anyone can scan and then view the videos that pop up.

We culminated Theme Week with the annual Faculty-Student basketball game. We streamed it live via UStream and recorded it for future reference. The students came from behind to win it- and the gym erupted at the final buzzer!

We have many more teachers using Voicethread or getting ready to use Voicethread. This ranges from first and second graders for an exploration of constellations, to middle school students describing their families in French for pen pals in France.

First and second graders have become news anchors and have put together a news video to share. The topics of their features have to do with various aspects of the community around our school.

Teachers had another in-service day focused on the Common Core. We also took a closer look at some SBAC sample items. In addition, the teachers shared and celebrated their work this year on implementing Common Core writing standards. We captured some of that sharing on video. I was happily surprised by the amount of technology being integrated into the Writing Workshop model. There were many teachers reporting out the positive aspects of Google Drive and blogging as critical elements of the writing process. (third-fifth grades)

I’m noticing that I am devoting less time to staying connected with my PLN via Twitter or Google+ and am reflecting on what’s taking priority over that. I feel disconnected and am not benefitting from this great resource of mine. Time to re-examine that!

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