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!

QR Code Content Review

I create anchor charts for each big science concept as the students are learning in the unit. I have posters with key ideas about all the work we have done this year, as students get ready for state testing I wanted a fun way to review the posters, have students aware of the location in the room and how to use the posters to get information during class and during the test.

I developed a basic question for each poster for the students to "find" the poster to scan. The students worked with a partner to then scan the code for a follow up question they could answer using the poster as a reference. I then used qrstuff.com to create text clues for the posters once students found the correct poster from their sheet. The students wrote the answer to the QR clue on their scavenger hunt sheet. The scavenger hunt allowed students to do some hunting and then do some thinking in a game like setting. Students also had the ipad's accessibility features on the questions generated by the QR code to support reading of questions.

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!"

Mystery Skype

Students were able to mystery skype with another science classroom in Huron, Ohio.  The students did well at their task, speaking, locating the class and using social media to connect with students in another classroom.  This was the first mystery skype we have done this year and it was successful for the following reasons:

• Using Langwitches Blog for great assessment and planning information
• Assigning jobs to students: questioners, answerers, greeter, partners: edmodo and map teams
• Practicing with questions that would be given in the "real" skype
• Practicing finding mystery locations with our questions

Silvia Tolisano's website host great ideas for digital learning, but her Skype resources were really helpful for me to execute a plan for my students and make sure the call was meaningful to our digital learning.  After we assigned jobs, read over the class questions, it was time to practice!  This step was really helpful for the students to practice both answering questions, using the questions, and working with a partner to narrow down the location of the classroom.  Two teachers skyped in from down the hall and created a "mystery" location for the students to work on.  The students teamed up as partners, one person had the skitch app open to the U.S. map and used the annotation tool to cross of states that were not the mystery location based on the questions and answers.  We also practiced answering the questions the class would ask us the following day.  (Sending the questions between teachers before hand is extremely helpful!) The partners on edmodo were able to share what the team was doing on the class backchannel.  This teamwork allowed students to work together and also share ideas if another team was not on the right track via edmodo.

When we skyped with the class on the actual mystery skype, the plan and practice the day before paid off.  The students were able to work comfortably with the map and edmodo and also had practice at being "on screen" for the Skype call.  They were able to locate the state after all the questioned were asked and they felt successful in the task.  After the skype we used edmodo again to backchannel our learning and ideas.  These became the tweets we composed to share our mystery Skype with a larger audience.

We are looking forward to connecting with other classrooms around the country through Skype! 

Excitement about Blogs

Students have completed three blog posts this year and each time the work has been improving. I am trying to have students write about content with as little restriction as possible. I want them to tell about what they have learned. I find that students are sometime crippled by the freedom to "write about what you learned" and need more specifics. I often tell them they can write and tell about a lab they conducted. This often leads to describing the lab process and use of vocabulary, but does not hit the big "concept" ideas. Other students write about big ideas but don't give the details and specifics to show depth of understanding and often have shallow posts. At the same time some students are really surprising me with what they are writing about and they are amazing me with their posts! The excitement is great and I will continue to work with them to create meaningful posts.

Read more here at our blog page:

Here are some examples ranging the descriptions above:

A student writes about the lab process.

"What we did for sedimentary rock to make them form is got a small cup in a big cup.we put the smallcup in side the big cup in we put the sand in it.then we got glue in water in put it in the the cup.in let it sit for 3 days or 4 when we got back we had tear the cup off in it become a rock."


A student explaining some learning through a lab experience.

"The crust doesn’t just get magma on it’s surface.I know there’s a way to get the magma on the crust.I think that the magma erupts for some reason.and after it’s ready to come out like a volcano.it must burn through the crust and get on the crust.
So,everybody knows that lava is hot and the igneous must be broken off when the volcano erupted .and it must have made another igneous rock and the pressure makes the magma must shoot up out of the vent.
And it must have happened when the pressure went up.
And I think that the mantle magma makes waves and builds pressure to make a huge wave.and that wave must go through the vent and gets on the crust.

And the igneous rock must break off and then that’s how I think igneous rocks are formed like that.and the rock breaks of again and more igneous rocks get formed more"


Information combining new knowledge and a lab experiences.

"These two weeks we been talking about sedimentary rocks. They are formed by wather and deposits of eroded rocks. The sedimentary rock then dries and dries and is slot of pressure. Then form. The particles start to end up covering.

shale is a sedimentary rock.The color is dark gray. The size is big.It is hard. Another rock is conglomerate. The color is yellow,gray,and white.
The sand stone color is red. It feel rough. It is small.

And the last is gypsum the color is light gray.It bumpy."