Launch Grant: Peer Feedback in Upper School Biology Class

Upper School science teacher Amanda Borking did a launch grant this year to explore the use of peer feedback through the PowerSchool class website. Students used the wiki-pages feature of PowerSchool to post content. They uploaded work there (such as this drawing of a chemistry example) and then used discussion boards to discuss their work. They also recorded and uploaded videos to add a more personal means of communication asynchronously.

In this example, students made a cartoon strip to illustrate chemical bonding.  

A few examples of peer feedback comments posted to the discussion board:

"When looking at their fairytale I really like how they represented the loss and gain of electrons by using shoes, I thought that was a really smart way to show this action. One part that was a little unclear was which atoms were bonding was which ones, I didn't figure it out until the end when you drew the final solution/equation. So in the future I would just write which atoms each ones are just to clarify. Secondly, another way to improve your fairytale might be to use more of the scientific words we learned such as ionic bond, valance electrons, intramolecular bonds, etc to relate your fairytale more to what we have been learning in class."

"I really liked their representation of how the two Chlorine atoms get the one needed magnesium electron. I think that perhaps they could have used more vocabulary such as non-metals and metals, or ionic or other words to describe what kind of reaction is taking place. I think that they could have also added a more scientific picture of what the atoms would looks like when they had shared them. I'm  a visual learner and it would help me understand the movement of atoms a little more. However, this group did an excellent job and I truly loved what they put on their story board."

MS English Launch Grant Project - Publishing Using FlipSnack

Middle School teacher Betsy Canaday did a launch grant during the 2015-2016 school year to explore ways technology can help students understand the complexity of the characterization in one of the novels within the curriculum. This novel, The Outsiders, is a story about high schoolers in the 50's. Ms. Canaday wanted students to explore physical and emotional characterization in today's tech setting, using social media and online communication. Her write-up of this project follows...

In Middle School English we are always looking for new ways to help students to connect with the reading.  A favorite book in our English curriculum is The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton.  The book, as many of you will remember, has a rich character list of high school students who clash and connect according to their class status, the Greasers and Socs.  Inspired and helped by Svetlana Grinshpan, we developed an end-of-unit project, The Yearbook.   We first looked at archived Browne and Nichols and Buckingham yearbooks from the fifties, which was great fun.  (They saw how the students have changed (or not) and how the buildings have changed (or not.)  Students then created a yearbook page for their assigned character, which they complied into their own yearbooks.

Each student had to write a formal “goodbye” in the voice of the character that expressed that character’s perspective, wishes, frustrations, etc.

They also had to include a list of clubs and activities the character would be likely to have attended (car maintenance, sunset watching, peace negotiation, etc.) and what their future plans would be after graduation.

The piece of the project that was most engaging to students was the photographs.  Each page needed to include a formal portrait of their character (the students in costume) and a “candid.”  For the candid students employed the green screen and Photoshop in order to place their characters in a school hallway, or park, or church on a hill, etc.

Once each page was complete, the student groups assembled their pages into a yearbook, complete with title, table of contents, front and back covers.

The yearbooks were handed in digitally and we made them into books using FlipSnack and posted them on our Haiku sites.

Examples of yearbooks linked here:

http://bbn.flipsnackedu.com/browse/fzulrffn      

http://bbn.flipsnackedu.com/browse/fu307aam

The project was great fun, but more importantly, the students really had to dig into their character and his/her role in the novel, use textual evidence to support their ideas, write coherently in the characters’ voice, and practice tech skills that were new to many.

Thank you for the opportunity to create this project.  It was one of the highlights of the year.

Betsy Canaday

MS English Department Head

Upper School Tech Byte #6- Haiku

Woodworking teacher Paul showed his colleagues how he uses Haiku to create slideshows showcasing both his students' artwork and that of professionals.  He also demonstrated how to use the Haiku gradebook to leave students comments on projects completed offline.  For more information on the Haiku gradebook, check out this HaikuLearning site.