Share Student Digital Work

Whenever I discuss technology and science instruction I always want to share my students' amazing work and let their voices be heard. Even if I wanted to take my students and ipads out with me this is often not possible. One of the best ways to share with people is to have work available online, but that limits the sharing to only the work.

In my recent trip to Atlanta to present with Jennie Magiera and Anita Huffman I wanted to bring my students into the room. I thought about how to share the students work and also have it feel as if they were presenting the work. I took pictures of students and used the Snapseed app to adjust the pictures. I then had students do a quick voice recording on croak.it to introduce themselves and also the work. The next step was to link both the work and the voice recording to QR codes. I printed the pictures and attached the QR codes.

A great way to share students and their work with a larger audience!

Wallwisher and Student Voice

In our classrooms we are always looking for ways to have student share and hear ideas with peers. The traditional models are "turn and talk" or "share at your group" but I have found even though this allows for student voice, this does not allow for me to be in every conversation or for students on opposite ends of the room to hear from each other.

In science, we are constantly thinking and sharing ideas about investigations, observations of images, etc. as we build understanding to new concepts. I always want to be able to have every voice be heard and every idea to be shared, but we don't have the time or the space often to do this in the physical classroom.

Solution: Wallwisher. Wallwisher is a great website that allows you to build a virtual cork board and have students write a virtual post-it note with ideas. The site allows for walls to be embedded so its a simple click to my homepage for students. The wall also does not require a user name or password to add a post it note. One of my biggest time issues with students on sites is creating, remembering and using user names and log ins. Wallwisher solves that.

Here is an example of the board I will be using next week for my students to share ideas about how earthquakes occur. I simply embedded it in my site and students can double tap on the ipad to create a post it. Simply add in their name and share the idea!





This will allow for me to go back and see exactly who is participating (I always wonder what some of my students are actually talking about...) and what ideas each person shared. But more important than me being able to view it, it allows all the ideas in the classroom to be "heard" and students can see even what someone on the other side of the room is sharing without having to be a turn and talk partner.

Class Flipsnack of Lab Reports

I blogged before about using Flipsnack to create digital books of student work to share student work. One of my goals with technology is to allow students to see and share their work with each other easily. Flipsnack is helping with sharing! I have created a digital book of the students' lab reports from a class water cycle investigation. I put the digital book as an embedded file on my homepage so students can individually locate it on my class website and see each others hypothesis, data collection and conclusion!

Check it out, this is three page preview or click here to the full "book!"