I’ve been working hard to break down barriers in my classroom this year. Sometimes this means learning barriers–like lack of opportunity or resources, and sometimes it means the physical borders. I have listed a Donors Choose to try to get my students some resources for a makerspace, I started a coding club, began bringing skype into my classroom, and just finished one of my favorite projects–a collaborative e-book created using Book Creator.
I love the features of Book Creator that allows you to combine books. We have used this many times in the younger grades to create class books, but I thought I’d like to take it to another level by finding a classroom in each region of the US to write about their area and then combining it into a collaborative e-book. I used Twitter to track down 4 willing classes (plus ourselves) who would represent their own regions by creating a chapter for our book. We kept guidelines minimal as I thought it would be fun to see how each group decided to share information. Generally there was just a list of topics each class should cover for their region, and of course the setup (landscape layout), so the pages could easily be combined.
My kids were super excited about collaborating on a project with other classrooms and I think they were super proud to know that their work would be “published” for other students to enjoy. We had fun deciding how to share information, and used tools such as DoInk for green screen and Chatterpix. We also decided to include some videos in our project, so the other students could enjoy a type of virtual field trip.
We will now use the final product as a non-fiction resource for further learning. In addition to this, we will take a moment to look over the layout choices made by each classroom and discuss how it enhanced the content…or what could have been improved. I look forward to seeing how kids engage with the text and the information they are able to bring back to the group–and how will this compare with a region text that was created for them (by a publishing company)… but not by them.
Next year I would love to add some skype interaction with the other classrooms at the end of the project. This would allow us the opportunity to ask questions and get some clarification about things they had written about. It would also allow us just one more opportunity to see that walls do not need to define our learning–especially now that we have technology resources. I don’t know that we’ll have time this year with testing season approaching, but I think that interaction would only enhance engagement and understanding!
TE(A)CHing in a NEW AGE 