Science Content through iMovie Trailers

I shared a few of these in my last presentation.  Again thanks to Craig Dwyer for having his trailer planning sheets on the web and shares widely.  I let my students decide what they wanted to "teach" to others, join a like-minded team and get to work.  One idea that I would do differently is talk through with kids about "examples" a bit more.  Many of my students just searched for pictures of the content: water cycle, pulley, etc instead of looking to break down the ideas to explain them better.  Here are two of the star iMovie trailers.

Enjoy

Food Chain

The Food Chain from Autumn Laidler on Vimeo.

Levers

Levers from Autumn Laidler on Vimeo.

PLAY and PLN

After an inspiring PLAYDATE13 teacher created conference in February, the teachers at my school have been continuing the learning in a similar exploration setting. We have committed to a once a month mini-PLAYDATE in which we pick one technology tool to explore together. We started with Twitter and we have established "Twitter Tuesday" with teachers and students tweeting, this month we moved onto book creation.

The group gathered and explore two big ideas in book creation: teacher creation for students and student book creation. We used Meg Wilson's book creation reccommendations to start. All of the paid app book creators were very generous to give codes so our teachers could test out the apps in our session. Teachers spent time working in pairs or groups to explore how these apps and see how they could best be utilized in our classrooms. Here are the results from our exploration. The big winners were Book Creator and Story Creator.



Having a group of teachers learn together has been a refreshing change from our usual staff meetings. The mini-PLAYDATE has a book club feel with a technology slant. It is teacher driven and teacher inspired. We already know that next month we will be looking at movie making. Have you thought about asking teachers to learn together in your school? We would be happy to Google Hangout with other likeminded teachers if you are up for it. Will we see you in April?