Validation

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With my Year 7s this year, I've been working on a unit about presentation. I admit that the initial inspiration for the unit came from Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen and, in it's first iteration, I actually named the unit Presentation Zen. Because my classes rotate on a trimester basis, I get the chance to tweak my units a couple of times a year and from looking at not just what my Year 7s could/couldn't do but also what students in upper years needed to do to be successful, I tried to help the Year 7s build some foundation skills for their secondary years. As such, the unit has evolved from focusing primarily on traditional presentation  (slideshow, speaking in front of the class, etc.) to maintaining that aspect but also adding the idea of presentation of written work, especially in a digital realm such as a blog. With this broadened focus came a renaming of the unit to Presentation Matters which, while it may not have that cool "Z" sound in it, seems to capture the heart of the unit a little better.

The students have done a range of things leading up to their presentations like learning better digital search techniques; taking research and putting that information into their own words in the form of a script; building visual support based on the information they want to communicate (i.e. their script) rather than fitting a script to images; and, all the while, gradually improving the presentation of their blog posts as well. Sometimes, as a teacher, you think up the ideas for the units and, on paper (well, digital paper), you think that things look pretty good and you hope that the learning and understanding that you expect will actually transpire. When I had the students start the trimester with a quickly thrown together presentation in their first lesson, I was impressed by the quality of the work and was beginning to doubt whether the kids would actually have much new learning.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="A Student's Presentation on My Dim Whiteboard"][/caption]

This week, the students have finally gotten to the point where they are presenting in front of their classes. Personally, I thought that the presentations were, in general, quite good but I wondered how much of that came from learning this year versus things they had learned prior to Year 7. Then, after one student had finished her presentation, I heard what I would like to consider a bit of validation that the unit of work has actually been useful. After the presentation finished, a girl in the audience said, "Mr. Jesse, these presentations are so good. I've watched seven presentations in a row and I'm not bored at all. In Year 6, I would have been asleep by now." And with that, we carried on with more presentations. Looking forward to seeing some of the students' reflections that come out of this to see what parts made a difference and what parts need less emphasis next time.

 

Relaunch Creation Has Begun

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After following the MYP Design Cycle through Investigation of their topic; Design of their ideas for solving their problem; and Plan of action for how they'll go about making their solution, my year 10 class have finally started creating their final Relaunch solutions. I'm actually pretty excited to see some of the things that my students have designed as they've come up with a range of ideas from stop motion to phone apps to a typography video.

[caption id="attachment_84" align="alignleft" width="224" caption="Stop Motion in Process"][/caption]

It was great to watch a student using Adobe Encore for the first time (I too have never used it) and he was having trouble getting Photoshop to open the menu file to edit it. We worked together to walk through some forums online and established that Photoshop wasn't the default program for opening that type of file so he changed the association and that solved his problem.

One of my favourite quotes I overheard from today was, "Earlier this lesson, I was behind plan but now I'm all caught up." I love when the students really start to "get it" and understand the big picture of the whole project. The students have almost six more weeks until the final creations are due so it'll be interesting to watch them evolve.

 

Final COETAIL Project Proposal

For our fifth and final course of the COETAIL program, we need to take everything we learned through the first four courses and apply it to our teaching. As a Technology teacher, the hardest part of this assignment for me is not using technology in my classroom but deciding which class to focus on. My Year 7s are doing a Presentation Zen themed unit. My Year 8s are doing photo manipulation with a range of programs. My Year 9s are creating Scratch animations based on social media and may pair up with students in British Columbia for feedback about their work. All of those would probably be reasonable and respectable choices but I've decided to go with my Year 10 class. Their project is an MYP moderated project which last year was called Relaunch. In last year's incarnation, students were asked to find a product that has lost prominence in the public eye and 'relaunch it' by producing some form of advertisement for it.

As a department, we knew that the unit could be better so this year's edition (still, somewhat awkwardly, titled Relaunch), I tweaked it a bit and gave students the choice of three problems to solve:

1. Using digital technology in an interesting or innovative way, how can you ‘relaunch’ (take something that people are already familiar with and promoting it in a new way by getting people to think about it in a new or different way) a real company or product’s public image with regards to its environmental or social perception?


2. Using digital technology in an interesting or innovative way, how can you promote a real club, service activity or event within the local community?


3. Using digital technology in an interesting or innovative way, how can you teach real people to actually do something they couldn’t do before?

The reason I chose this unit as my focus for my final project lies in the words, "using digital technology in an interesting or innovative way." Unlike many units where the students are pushed towards a particular way of presenting their information, this one is a bit different in that students choose themselves what they will do. So far, students have chosen different types of video, stop motion, creating a website, creating a phone app and one student has chosen to try to create a chat bot type solution. I have some experience with most of these but I've only dabbled in app building and I've never even considered making a chat bot let alone thought about how to do it. I find it exciting that my students are willing to challenge themselves to try new things and push their learning forward rather than falling back on things they're already comfortable with. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with!