Presenter: Rebecca Pilver
Location: Willington, CT USA
Link to presenter’s K12Online Ning Profile page
Presentation Title: The Top Ten
Presentation Description: See how Web 2.0 tools and 21st century literacies are woven into a project-based Language Arts unit. In this video you will learn about the learning activities that led up to the culminating product, The Top 10 Wiki. The Top 10 unit is aligned to standards, big ideas and essential questions, and integrates a variety of instructional strategies both off line and on line. Although the work you will view was done by 4th grade students, this model could be applied across the grade levels.
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Link to presentation’s supporting documents:
http://top10.sblc.wikispaces.net/Links
Additional Information:
Twitter: @rebpilver
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This was done by fourth graders?! Wow! This is awesome! I love how each of the top 10 animals had their own page with the same information. That would make it really user friendly for the audience! It also shows the careful research that the students had to do in order to create the animals’ page. Another thing that I thought was a great idea was that you had specific criteria (that the students came up with) to rank each animal rather than just ranking them. It was great that the public was able to give feedback by voting for which animal they believed was the top predator. There are so many different objectives covered all in one project. I bet the students had a BLAST doing this and the parents were really impressed. One thing I struggle with is being able to show parents what we are doing in class. This seems absolutely perfect!
What a WONDERFUL and thoughtful project to engage students in active learning where they are the ones responsible for creating and owning their knowledge. Project based learning is time consuming and requires thoughtful planning, but it is certainly more meaningful for students than didactic teaching and I want to do more of it. Thank you for sharing such a motivating and inspiring experience with all of us.
WOW! What a wonderful, engaging project. This is very motivating. I loved the fact that there was problem and you gave it to the class to help solve. This gives them such ownership. Embedding the clustermap so that the students could see where in the world their wiki was being viewed was a good incentive to keep the students on track and doing their best work.
I am always trying to come up with some idea to use with my class, thank you for sharing yours!
Wow! This really is a great example of how project-based learning can really allow students to be challenged successfully. This gave a lot great ideas as well as set high expectations of primary age students.
This was amazing! I loved everything about this project on so many levels! This is a research assignment on steroids! Although this was done by 4th graders, I would love to incorporate some of the class collaboration effort and technology into my kindergarten class. This has started me thinking about projects my class could do and get feedback from others.
Amazing! Great lesson for the students to work on together. What a great way to use technology in the classroom!
I am amazed at all the technology they have. I would love to use their technology in my class. I would use some of this for my second graders. Some of this is to advanced but still has great lessons for the high students. I do love aquatic animals so I was very interested. Good Job Kids!!
VERY engaging project! What a motivator. I loved the fact that the class was given a problem to solve collaboratively. VERY cool cluster map so that students could see where their wiki was being viewed. was a good incentive. Thanks for sharing this!
Awesome!! The Top Ten was an amazing use of technology in the classroom. I enjoyed exploring the website and was amazed by how much work and effort the students put into this project. Kudos to the teacher!
The collaborative component in this project were fantastic. This project allowed for learning at multiple levels (vocab, cooperation tech skills, science facts, etc). I can see how this would be very useful in a Social Studies unit–students could create an historical figure instead of the voci-zoologist/avatar(sp?) and then do a top ten poll for an historical event (or figure) that had the most impact on the time period studied.
At first I found it hard to believe that fourth graders could do a project like this with so many objectives! After watching the entire video however, I was really impressed with how the teacher broke the assignment up, one day focusing on fact and opinion, another day on evaluating evidence, etc, and tying it all together. This could cover so many standards and is a very engaging way to combine reading, writing, and science into one big project. This has given me a lot of ideas.
This fantastic, multi-dimensinal project included such incredible collaborative elements for students! I love the use of the voki (avatar) zologist instead of just reading text. This type of wiki, (and other parts,too), can be very helpful (and fun) to use in Social Studies. Students could, for example, vote for most influential historical character or event–the one that had the most impact.Students could creat a voki historian–they would love it!!
wow what an amazing lesson, the children and the teacher did an amazing job, I loved that it included so many learning styles and the I don’t know what to do ? great in the moment teaching.
What an amazing process. I appreciate the idea of students collaborating throughout the project and finding ways to work through their bias. Bias comes in a variety of forms; it was great to hear how students brainstormed ideas in an effort to fix the rankings.
In addition, using the clustermap added value to the project and solidified the students’ hard work and efforts.
Although the project is too advanced for my students (Pre-K) it gives great ideas as to how to use the different technology resources. We just had a lesson on habitats and the resources that Rebecca presented would have been very helpful!
This was a really great project! I love how the students were involved with creating the criteria for ranking the animals, this is a high order thinking skill. I like how the teacher involved the students as much a possible and allowed the students freedom. This makes me think about the possibilities in my classroom.
I really enjoyed watching this video, it was an amazing display of how technology should be used within the classroom. I love the use of essential questions to guide instruction and the use of online and book resources to find information about animals. I also really like the cooperative learning taking place in this classroom and the community it created. I am also very pleased that you involved the whole school as well. You were able to reach all students and really make this very engaging. This was an unforgettable lesson. Thanks for sharing.
What a powerful lesson! I was very impressed with the amount of concepts covered in one project. It truly was an authentic learning experience. The mishap that happened after the students voted on the most dangerous animal was a perfect learning point for both the teacher and the students.This was such a concrete project that will definitely give the students something to connect to in the future.
This was an awesome projects the children really seemed interested in it and learned a lot about different predators.
Thank you for sharing this project! While many aspects are beyond my Kindergarten kids, there are some excellent resources which could be used whole-class to support non-fiction writing this year.