Come to our Colony!

I gave my students an assignment to research the different colony groups (New England, Middle, and Southern Colonies). They used google presentation to create their presentations. I had used this before in a training I did over the summer, but I thought the students would enjoy this tool because they could all simultaneously edit the same presentation at the same time.

I created small groups in Edmodo and posted the different link in each of the small groups. This way, the only people that would be able to access the link to the presentation would be the students that were assigned to that small group. Well, the time came to start the presentations and Murphy's Law came into full force...Edmodo was down and not working! I tried to think quickly and decided to post the different links on the Symbaloo. I reinforced Internet etiquette and how we never access or change work that was not ours. I even demonstrated this to the students using the google presentations. I was so excited about this assignment and my students were too!

As I said, Murphy's Law...My students did great; however, being that other teachers in the county also have access to my symbaloo, they also had access to the presentations. As one group was working, someone started deleting their work and typing inappropriate things on the presentation. I knew it wasn't anyone of my students doing this so I only assumed it was a student from another school that was using the symbaloo. My kids did as much as they could, but it was difficult to finish the assignment when somebody was messing with their work. They were getting very frustrated. Once edmodo was working again, I had them create a post within their small group telling me about what they liked about this presentation method and what frustrated them. They had some very insightful things that will definitely help me to run this better in the future.

Another thing I had them create was a "Choose Your Own Adventure" video that had to do with their colonies. This part of the assignment was kind of thrown on them at the last minute because I wanted to see how they would handle it (plus I had only just learned how to create one of these using Youtube). I have created a link to their finished product. It is rough, but considering the little amount of time they had to do this assignment, I think they did quite well! When you pull up the video, you will be able to click on which colony group you would like to visit! I hope to do more of these in the future to work on our standard that deals with persuasion. I would love to hear any one's ideas!

Colony group 1

Colony group 2