2nd Grade Rocks!

We came across two great ideas for tech integration lessons this week, both from second grade teachers in our district.

1) Persuasive Writing - a Montgomery teacher's students used Grandparents.com to research a city that interested them, find and download pictures of interesting attractions in that city, save the files to their network drives, then import them into an Animoto video with music, text and pictures, persuading their grandparents or other adults to take them on a trip to that city.

2) Book Reports - Librarians at North Wales and Hatfield are helping students make Reading-Rainbow-style video book reports. The students will write their reports, read them on camera, edit them in Windows Live Movie Maker, and share them via the NPTV YouTube channel or on the teachers' Wikispaces pages.

Both of these projects begin and end with the curricular goals in mind, but both also involve a lot of important 21st Century Skills. I am particularly impressed by all the skills students are developing in terms of technology operations and concepts. They are learning about finding information online, saving files in the network, file extensions and converting files, and putting the appropriate media (pictures, video, audio, music, etc.) in the right order to tell a story or make a convincing point.

With the students all coming from different tech backgrounds and experiences, this process can be slow and challenging for students at this age. But in addition to noticing how many concepts were new to these students, we also noticed how quickly they learned how to do what was expected of them. The skills they developed from this project lay foundations that their teachers in 5th and 6th grade will be extremely grateful for. I applaud these teachers and their students for tackling some difficult tasks and creating excellent projects.

Now for a note on last week's post...

I still have no passport. I went to the courthouse and submitted my birth certificate, license, and form, and was told I needed to fill out the form in black ink, not blue. I filled out the form again, and then was told that my birth certificate, which my parents obtained for me when I was 12 in order to get a passport, was no longer acceptable for passports. I had to file for a new long-form copy from the office of vital records, which I did online, but will take at least 14 days to arrive, before returning with the paperwork, documents, and several fees, some cash, some check.

When I left the courthouse, I found a parking ticket on my windshield, and had to spend an additional half hour chasing down the parking authority officer to show that I had paid for the parking space (she had given me a ticket for a space in which I was not parked) to have her rip up the ticket.

The good news? I get to do it all again in a few weeks when the birth certificate arrives. Hooray for challenges, right? :)