By Michelle George
I wonder if all teachers and students feel the slow drag of third quarter. By the time March begins, the class hours seem to lengthen with the lingering sunlight. Students acting as seventh graders normally do, bemoaning my latest project, seem more apathetic than hesitant. The gray mornings feel colder, and the weekends feel shorter. It seems the lion of March has slunk in, and that cat is crabby! It’s a good thing spring break is just around the corner with the promise of rest and rejuvenation for students and teachers alike.A few teachers will escape to a warm beach somewhere and sip drinks with floating umbrellas. That sounds mighty fine to me right now, but I’m planning to try out some of the creative projects that I’d like to share with my students when we return. Spring break presents the opportunity for me to indulge in technology and take time for my “creative fix.”
The revised version of Bloom’s Taxonomy shown here has “creating” as the pinnacle of the pyramid. It’s interesting that most versions of the spectrum actually changed the labels of stages from nouns like “comprehension” to action verbs like “understanding.” Students are no longer expected to be simply consumers of information; they are now viewed as active producers, expected to use the tools we provide them to produce and create.
It’s pretty exciting really. Rather than spending hours drilling facts and static content into their heads, we have the opportunity to guide students into producing original work of their own. We can prepare them by teaching critical-thinking strategies while introducing the myriad of tools available on the Internet to practice those strategies. Where before we might be limited to pen and pencil and a bit of glue, now we can have our students create eBooks, posters, movies, and podcasts with very little investment. The rub comes in that many of us don’t know how to use those tools ourselves, and after an hour or two of planning and grading each night, there just isn’t much time to experiment. Then in comes the gift of time we call spring break.
Now I can already hear the swoosh of your eyeballs as they roll dramatically back into their orbits. “What about the ‘break’ part of spring break?” you may reasonably ask. My answer is simply that this learning endeavor can and should be fun. I suggest that we try out some of these tools in purely self-serving ways. Why not take the time to be creators ourselves and make something that piques our own interests and feeds our creative souls?
For example, I’m going to work on creating a photo book over break. I set a goal last year to take a picture a day so I could chronicle my daily life while learning how to better use that cool camera I received for Christmas. I must confess that a picture a day turned into one or two a week, but I did learn a great deal about the manual settings on my camera, and I have a few hundred photographs that I’d love to publish. I’m going to design a photo book with chunks of journaling on a website like Blurb.com. This project will prepare me to help my students publish a class book of their own photographs with accompanying poetry.
I’m also going to create a short video of my winter escape to the Oregon Coast. I’m planning to use an online tool like Animoto. Then I’ll be ready to make use of my educator’s account and have my students create a short video for the how-to project they will be writing in May. I might also link my video to a QR code that I create using a QR code generator. Once I’ve mastered the process, I can better plan the unit where my students create book trailers for a novel they read. I’m hoping to link the student trailers to QR codes that I place in those books in our school library. That way other students can scan the codes with their various devices and get a preview of the book before checking it out. How's that for an authentic audience?
I can easily think of more creative projects for my week off than I’ll ever be able to finish. I’d like to develop my own blog, and trick out my website with some interactive widgets, and maybe link podcasts of my better mini-lessons. The possibilities are nearly endless. Unfortunately my time is limited, so I’m going to have to save some projects for summer break. My point is that, while I’m recharging by indulging some of my personal interests, I can also be developing my abilities to allow my students the opportunities to create. That sounds like a winning use of my time, and I’ll be energized for the frenetic pace of the final term of the school year that is just around the corner.
Michelle S. George is a language arts middle school teacher in Orofino, Idaho. She has a B.A. in English and secondary certification in English, reading, and journalism. Michelle has been teaching seventh and eighth grade for 20 years, and still loves going to school, as a teacher and a student. She has published a variety of lesson plans and written several award-winning grants. Visit her classroom at http://georgem19.wix.com/mrs-george-ojshs
Do you have a recommendation for a Web 2.0 tool teachers could try out over spring break? Would you like to blog about some of the tools you're using in your classroom? We want to hear from you! Please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below!
