During their unit of inquiry titled 'Hello Hello', Year 3 students discussed Twitter to support the central idea 'Advances in technology change the way we communicate'. Here is what they thought about Twitter at the beginning of the discussion.
We watched a video by Commoncraft describing twitter in plain English. The discussion continued thereafter and the students took it to Digital Citizenship when someone talked about posting about something that happened. I asked them what would happen if someone fell and i tweeted about it? Does that mean twitter is a bad thing or a good thing? Below was their response after half the class said twitter was a bad thing and the other half thought twitter was a good thing.
Conclusion: Twitter is a new communication tool that can be good or bad depending on how you use it. One of the students asked if we could tweet videos and other media. Next week, we are going to the twitter website to see if we can tweet about our learning! Will we be able to share their voices saying what they learned on twitter? How fast will it take for the tweet to reach to people around the world? How is that different from how people used to communicate in the 20th century?
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We constructed a KWL Chart with Year 3 students while discussing internet safety. We went through what the students already knew and what they wanted to know. Later, we watched a video and continued with our discussion taking note of what we had learned. Scroll through to see our KWL Chart below.
Students in Year 3 studied a variety of habitats during their unit of inquiry. They gathered facts from a number of sources and built physical models of the habitats. The students used the 30 Hands iPad app to capture images and record their voices telling a story about their habitats. It was good to see the students helping each other capture images, record and record their voices and make necessary corrections. During a mini exhibition in the classroom, parents were invited to listen to the Digital Stories about each habitat and have a look at the physical model. Students worked on their speaking skills as they had to speak loudly and clearly in-order for the viewers to hear their stories. We were lucky enough to have headphones to avoid noise from others' voices in the room. Students in Year 3 sent out digital postcards to their parents via e-mail. They created postcards during the Art class and used the Tellagami iPad app to record themselves describing their art work, the colors they used and where they come from or how they made them. It was interesting to see how the digital postcards reached their destination quicker than the traditional postcards and that some students received immediate feedback as an e-mail reply. Below is one postcard that we sent out.
Year 3 students wrote stories to celebrate 100 days in school. We read an interactive story on the iPad and discussed how we could also create our own. We used the Pixntell iPad App to create a digital story to read to the younger students in our school. During their unit 'Advances in technology can change the way we communicate' Year 3 students discussed the trends in technology we use to communicate today including the telephone, blogs, social media, video, comics and so on. We visited a school's blog and it was interesting to see what other students are saying about their learning experiences. We replied to a few posts establishing a link between their school and ours.
We discussed the fact that in the 21st century web 2.0 enables us all to be publishers of content and used the Comic Creator from ReadWriteThink to create comic strips that teach people about the IB Learner Profile. Students were excited to see their comic strips printed on paper and immediately colored them in to make them look nice. Below is a couple of examples of our comic strips describing being open-minded and principled, printed and colored in. In Year 3, we learned new skills in Microsoft Word including, inserting pictures from a location on the network, creating tables and page boarders to decorate our work. We typed out a paragraph about ourselves and realised we needed to practice our typing regularly inorder to complete our work promptly. We included pictures of ourselves and showed what we like doing during 5 days of the week in the form of a table. We then decorated the page using a page boarder of our choice. Some students added a watermark and some used a page background.
During our reflection time, we created word clouds for the word wall in the ICT Lab using Tagxedo. Tagxedo is a free web application that lets you create a word cloud using your own text or text from a website or another source. We were excited about the fact that we could choose different kind of shapes for our word clouds. Our word clouds were made out of words we commonly used in Microsoft Word. |
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