Grade 8 Water Unit Blog

In grade 8, students study a variety information about water. We live in Calgary and although we have some pretty great rivers, it is a tricky time of year to spend too much time in the water, or even outside for extended periods of time. So, this year I'm going to try to have students generate their own understanding of the concepts through blogging.

We started last week by looking at a basic 3 tiered version of Bloom's taxonomy which included: Remembering, Understanding and Applying. Students then went through the curriculum and listed everything that they needed to learn. We then worked as a whole class to find logical clusters of topics. Groups were assigned to take a topic and generate 50 questions relating to that area of the water unit (there was some variation in the classes, but in general there were topics like: frozen water, oceans, lakes and rivers, human impact, wildlife, water movement etc). When the groups had 50 questions, they went through the questions and determined which were 'remembering' type questions, which were 'understanding' type questions and which were 'application' type questions.

Answering the 'Remembering' Questions
The next step is to get students answering these questions in an 'Ask Jeeves' type response. The goal is not to just get answers to the questions, but rather to make it clear and interesting for people to come and read the answers. For this portion of the project, we are going to start with 'remembering' questions and students are going to each answer one question on their own from each unit. They can find movies on the internet, do a lab themselves and take pictures, they can explain, describe etc, but obviously they can not just copy and paste something from the internet. Each student will write a blog with appropriate tabs so that others can later access their information. These blogs will be attached to my blog for ease of sharing information.

Answering the 'Understanding' Questions
Once all the 'remembering' questions have been addressed by the class, small groups of students will start to tackle the 'understanding' questions. The goal here will be to only use information posted on our communal blog site. If students can not find what they are looking for on our blog, they will write out the question missing and add it to the bank of information. Again, the goal will be for each group to address one 'understanding' question from each of the main topics.

Answering the 'Applying' Questions
The goal is to follow a similar strategy for these questions as well, but I am curious to see how these sections go and talk to the students and design something for this section that will work for them. So, I'll leave this portion open at the moment.

It should be interesting....wish us luck!!

Project almost complete

In the past week, all the students designed a plan for their project. One student in each group opened a new google doc for their group, added the members of the group and also added me. I put up a google doc with a list of all the important curriculum connections from each of the job descriptions. Their plan needed to include a general description of what would happen in each scene and also a list, or description of which curriculum points would be discussed in that scene. I told all the groups that they would not have class time to actually work on their project until the plan was complete and was approved by me. As groups were building their plan, I regularly checked their document and gave some feedback. The biggest stumbling block here seemed to be that the students would write all the curriculum points in one scene rather than trying to make it flow with all the information mixed together. I explained that it would probably be quite boring if for a whole scene the doctor talked only about all the health challenges. All the groups got the hang of it eventually and designed a plan in about 3 classes.

As students finished their plan, I talked to each group about the importance of getting the science into their project and then making an entertaining and educational presentations. Most of the groups in my class are either making movies using iMovie or animation using goanimate.com. Since then, students have been filming and designing the animation and they seem to be having lots of fun and are generally working well together.

So far, I would say that the two best features of this project are that students are really working collaboratively and that there are lots of opportunities for formative assessment both in class and in the google docs. The students only have one more class to work on their projects, but I have given them an extra week before the project is due.

Because all 8 grade 9 classes are doing this project we have decided to have presentations with students from different classes. We couldn't have them all presenting to each other because it would have taken too long. Instead, we decided to have 6 classrooms with about 8 groups in each class. This will take about 2 class periods and so the staff at the school has allowed all the grade 9s to be in our science classes for those 2 periods. I am really looking forward to seeing the presentations, it will be the culmination of a lot of work on the part of these students. Students and teachers who are observing the presentations are going to evaluate each presentation and we will tally the results and the top 6 presentations will be shown to the whole school at our lunchbox theater.

Moving on to the planning phase

Students have completed their work on the google doc that related to their jobs and are now back in their mission groups working on a plan for their entertaining and educational presentations.

I had the drama teacher come in and talk to the students about the importance of having a good tight plan and also how to go about making this plan. She also talked about some of the aspects that make a movie, skit, animation, etc entertaining. It was excellent to have her advice and feedback for students on this portion of the project.

Over the weekend I looked at all the 'job' google docs and highlighted the portions that need to be in their presentations. In general, the documents were excellent; they were well researched, logically flowing concise documents that covered most if not all of the information that was required. There was only 1 group that did not seem to get the idea of working collaboratively and as such their document had fragmented parts representing each person's work. Even after extensive feedback throughout, they did not seem willing to work together. Since it is important for all students to have a good document, I copied the doc from the other class into their google doc so that everyone would have good information to work from. I have spoken with the group members and have emphasized the need to step it up for the next phase of the project.

So, the intention of the planning phase is for groups to break their project into 5-10 chunks. In each chunk they will give an overview of what is happening during this section of the story and also explain which of the curricular connections will be addressed in that chunk of the presentation. Students are struggling a bit right now, but I have a few groups who really get what is needed and so tomorrow I will show their work to other groups so that they don't waste too much time before getting back on track. They are excited to get developing their presentation, but they will not be allowed to do this until I have approved their plan.

The students still seem very excited about the project, but I think they are happy to be back working with their originally chosen groups.