Ian Brown just won the coveted Charles Taylor Prize for literary nonfiction, and before that, for this same book, the National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. During his acceptance speech, Mr. Brown was quoted in The Globe and Mail Feb. 09/10, A(2) referring to online reading as “little blurts of information”. Do we approach online research… Continue reading CSS Library: "Little Blurts of Info"
One of our Humanities Teachers, Chris Dittmann, recently gave a presentation at the South Western Alberta Teachers Conference (SWATCA) on a grade 5 digital storytelling project. The project has previously been explained on this post. Here’s a copy of the presentation given by Chris, with one of the full examples of grade 5 student work:… Continue reading Historical Ditigal Storytelling Presentation
Here at the Science School, I would say that Google Docs has become one of the tech tools that has had the greatest uptake across our classrooms. Over the last couple years, students and teachers have begun using this tool to take collaborative notes and study guides, peer edit across classes and grades, make group… Continue reading Google Docs versus Wikis
This project is a grade 9 Science Project examining the topic of biofuel development. Students were introduced to the topic through a powerpoint presentation designed to hook the students with some of the controversial facts on the issue. Students worked through the development of a number of research questions, and then began a collaborative research… Continue reading Grade 9: Food or Fuel
Our Grade 8 study of Worldviews is in full swing. As written before, the students have created a survey with the hopes of gathering global data on worldview trends. The students worked with Rob Pegg to learn the important elements of survey design. We then had our grade 9 students critique the grade 8 survey… Continue reading Grade 8 Worldview Survey is Live!
Our grade 8 students are currently in the middle of large-scale study, combining both the Worldview and Renaissance components of the Social Studies curriculum. This study contains two sections, first the creation of a worldview survey, and then a study on the Renaissance, comparing the Italian City States to the conditions in contemporary Calgary. To… Continue reading Grade 8: Creating Effective Surveys
One of our grade 7 Humanities teachers, Dan McWilliam, just finished a project with his grade 7 students. In order to understand the concept of perspective in historical accounts, Dan had his students re-write a ‘picture book’ on colonialization from an alternate perspective. Dan used the book “The Rabbits,” written by John Marsden and illustrated… Continue reading Grade 7: Remixing Historical Perspective
Some of our grade 6 students have recently finished a large scale writing project, called the Penny Book project. This project involves students writing a series of short stories, capturing memories from different years of their lives. The students have just finished all the planning, writing, editing and polishing of the stories, and the next… Continue reading Grade 6 Graphic Design
Last week, our grade 8 students had the good fortune of having an hour and a half skype chat with Wes Fryer, an educational thinker and blogger from Oklahoma. Wes was very generous with his time – and we were very thankful for the opportunity to chat with him. Our students are currently working on… Continue reading Grade 8's Skyping With Wes Fryer
We recently had our first student-led conferences of the year. Like many schools, this is a time when students walk their parents through some of their learning over the term, as well as reflecting over the first 3 months of the year and setting goals for the next term. This term a couple of our… Continue reading Student Led Conferences: Using Podcasts
