Tripods are AWESOME

After receiving the snowball microphones and tripods from Donors Choose, I was so excited to put them to use!

After reading a survival themed novel, my 8th graders were challenged to create an RSA video answering the following question: What does it take to survive? What are the skills necessary and how can we learn these skills through literature? 

In the past, students have struggled with keeping their cameras stable for the stop-motion animation part of this project. This year, having tripods available solved this problem. Students were also able to record their audio tracks with the snowball microphones. These devices helped improve the quality of student videos tenfold.

However, in filming for this project, students who used their own phones to film were more successful than those who used the iPads. This made us realize that our program needs adapters for the iPads to use them with the tripods. We are now asking parents to donate iPad Tripod Mount Adapters (about $10 a piece on Amazon). Fingers crossed that we are able to get enough to solve this problem.

Using Digital Tools to Simulate Performance Tasks in the Artroom

At our most recent Professional Development Day we discussed the role of assessment and evaluated assessment strategies to identify whether or not our assessments hit the 4 levels of the DOK. After this discussion we dived into SBAC data to determine patterns. The SBAC data is very broad and does not target specific skill sets, but it does outline how students are able to problem solve with multi-step problems. Individual multi-step problem solving is something our students could use more practice with. Thinking about our pillars and the many opportunities we provide for our students to collaborate led me to believe that one we we can increase the ability for individuals to tackle multi-step problems is with Task Performance Challenges.

This got me excited, REALLY excited, because I had developed a digital project over the fall that I was too nervous about teaching for fear of glitches, skill level and just the unknown. So I decided I would use a block period (85 minutes) to the introduce the digital art project as a challenge on a sideshow, review the steps on the board, reinforce that it was an individual challenge,  and have students upload their completed project and write a justification process onto a google form for completion.

I think this project was a great start to setting up engaging, individual challenges that lead kids through multiple steps. I am really happy with their projects! You can see all of them here, but I posted several stand-outs.