The Student Eye: What Makes Life Awesome?
This post is authored by Salisbury High School teacher, Jennifer Brinson.
What Makes Life Awesome? This is the question that the Salisbury High School Gifted Seminar students are posing through their new blog entitled The Student Eye. Students are blogging about everything from hot air balloons to stories they have written to amazing plays on the soccer field. They are including new dirt bikes, watching football games with dad, sunrises, catching something like a ninja, and the whole baseball team getting a hit. Everything goes on this blog – it just has to follow one simple rule…..it has to be AWESOME! That’s right, in order to be blog worthy, an event just has to be awesome.
This idea was not original to us. The blog is fashioned after Neil Pasricha’s blog 1000 Awesome Things. Pasricha started writing his blog after a turn of tragic events in his life and he began seeing the good in the world. He took to his computer and began writing about them, one day at a time — open checkout lines, refills on sodas, dogs in the driver’s seats, nice cops, you name it. If it was free and universal – Pasricha thought it was awesome and now – so do we!
The students will post a blog entry once a week that consists of an image, movie clip, audio track, or simply text. They can post from their laptops, smartphones, tablets – whatever device they choose as we chose a blog platform that has apps for Android and iOS devices. The rule is – no blog can be more than two paragraphs in length. Make your point and keep it simple. Each student comments on two other blog entries by other students – sustainable and inspiring comments – not simply “I agree.” The goal is to get the students to look at their world through a different lens and appreciate it. Please check out The Student Eye: What Makes Life Awesome?
Miss Piagesi and Mrs. Burns – High School English Projects
Miss Jennifer Piagesi, high school English teacher, and Mrs. Robin Burns, high school library media teacher, have been collaborating on several projects for 10th grade English students.
Miss Piagesi and Mrs. Burns worked with students to create several project-based assessments to complete both the short story and non-fiction units. Students were able to work either individually or in groups to combine text, images, and music using Animoto to retell their chosen short story.
The Apple Tree by Katherine Mansfield – Animoto by Hannah Ibrahim and Connor Wagner
The non-fiction project required students to create a brochure in Pages using several elements from each portion of the unit. Students were also offered the opportunity to create a movie project.
Abolone, Abolone, Abolone by Toshio Mori
Movie by Tyler Rutt, Michael Palmer and Dustin Pope
High School Economics: Moving Our World
On February 13, students from Miss Jennifer Brinson‘s Economics class at Salisbury High School shared a challenging economics project at PETE&C, Pennsylvania’s state technology conference and expo. Miss Brinson, along with students Abigail Eichhorn, Jackie Busolits and Lauren Brown, shared what they learned designing and working on this project.
We were doing a scarcity project in our Economics class and we wanted to select a topic more out of the box, so we chose the scarcity of technology, specifically the scarcity of communication between rural medical centers and patients in need. This lead us to the organization of Hope Phones. We then took the process of gathering old cell phones into our school and continue to collect them to this day.
The students and their work are featured on the Discovery Education Blog. Be sure to visit the link to view the various public service announcements and read more about the project. Congratulations to Miss Brinson and her students for being selected to present their work at one of the most popular educational technology conferences in the United States!
High School Government
This post contributed by Salisbury High School Social Studies Teacher, Miss Jennifer Brinson.
Earlier this year, students created timelines about the events leading up to the writing of the Constitution using the web 2.0 tool Capzles. The outline of the project and rubric are located online.
Examples of student Capzles projects:
Students also created Blabberize projects, choosing one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Students then engaged in a Socratic Seminar where they assumed the role of their historical figure during the seminar. The Declaration of Independence project and outline are available online.
Examples of student Blabberize projects:
The increased student access to technology this year has had a significant impact on my classroom. Students are collaborating and communicating more this year than ever. I am also noticing the following:
- Students are using tools like Google docs to share notes.
- Students are using Quizlet to set up flashcards and then share them with the entire class.
- Students are using Skype to chat, but then using it to share links and files.
- Students expect me to share a Keynote presentation of lectures so they can take their own notes directly on the slides.
- Students expect to answer an essential question with every project: “How do you move your world forward?”
- Students immediately look up information that is unknown to them when we discuss issues in class – particularly current events.
- When given a project with choices built in, it is interesting to see how many students opt to use technology tools perceived as more challenging – i.e. iMovie, Prezi, GoogleEarth.
- Gaming is not just for goofing off. We have built in competitions where students earn badges for good posts, excellent thinking, making me laugh, keeping the peace, demonstrating school spirit, etc. Students also have found games for various topics being studied. These games include Ayiti: The Cost of Life, which requires students to make economic decisions for a family in Haiti to keep them alive through a growing season, and the Bailout Game which requires students to make decisions about who the government should bail out.
- We use Edmodo as our class management tool, providing students the opportunity to ask questions through the portal or email. Students are much more apt this year to communicate their questions or confusion, providing me the opportunity to provide assistance more quickly. Using Edmodo has also allowed the classroom to become almost entirely paperless. All assignments are provided through and turned in via Edmodo.
