One of the wonderful educational tools that recent technology affords is digital storytelling. Applicable in a wide variety of subject areas and curriculum connections, digital storytelling provides a medium for students to demonstrate their understanding in rich ways through the act of combining of images, text, and sounds. This grade 8 example was completed for… Continue reading Digital Storytelling: Student Exemplar
Over the last number of years, our grade 9 students have participated in a project called Canada: Your Story is My Story. This project involves students interviewing recent immigrants to Canada with the purpose of better understanding the immigration experience. After meeting and interviewing new Canadians, the students create multi-media narratives of the immigration stories… Continue reading Exploring Immigration: A Student Perspective
Yesterday two of our grade 9 Humanities classes had the opportunity to have a discussion with two classes of grade 8 students at Wayne Highland Middle School in Honesdale, PA. Using Skype, the students were able to ask other questions about the differences between the political systems in our two countries. Student on both ends… Continue reading Cross Border Skyping – Part 1 of Many?
As described in previous posts, here and here, our grade 8’s have been working through a study of the Italian Renaissance, examining the conditions that existed, and then making comparisons with life in contemporary Calgary. In order to help bridge the gap between the Italian Renaissance and contemporary Calgary, we made use of a number… Continue reading Grade 8: Renaissance Debates
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
