Time Travel Brochures

Description of Project

To teach about geologic time I have my students create time travel agencies. Student work in groups of four to design vacation packages to different prehistoric eras. It's a 5 day project where the first two days are spent researching the plant/animal, climate/geologic characteristics from that era. The next day students design attractions framed around those characteristics and come up with an agency, name, logo, and distinguishing characteristics (senior citizen discounts, witty taglines, etc..) The last two days students plug their great ideas into Microsoft Publisher and whip out an amazing trifold brochure product.

What I love about PBL (project based learning)

• Content: content is learned through the project vs content acquisition then project.  Also content came from both library books I had checked out on a cart as well as a list of recommended sites I had found before hand that contained middle-school friendly language. 

• Collaboration: not only did students work in travel agency groups but they added sites onto our Recommended Website page for students in other classes to use. Collaboration was real-time and all-the-time, web-based.

• Creativity: students could go as crazy as they wanted with attractions, themes, etc... Several ended up spending hours and hours outside of school to make a final product they were proud of. The opening pics were of Tessa's amazingly artistic and content-rich brochure.

Publishing

After attending the METC conference I was haunted by the idea of publishing student work.  Why have them spend a week of class time to make a product that only I (or there mom) would look at? What if I gave them a larger audience and allowed their peers to celebrate their creativity with them?

Here's what I did.

The day after students submitted their brochures I put the brochures out by class on 4 different tables. Students were instructed to skim through the brochures from each table and put "+" next to features of a brochures they thought was cool. Think of it as a low-tech Facebook like.

Then they voted on the winning brochure for each class.  At the end of the day I had student-generated feedback on which brochure was the best for each class.  Students loved it!

Quotes I heard

• "I have 27 pluses!"

• "Look they're all voting for me! That's all me!!!!"

• "I've voting for Tessa."

Why a 1:1 environment was essential to making this happen

1. Video tutorials: Students watched a 2 min tutorial I made on how to start a brochure in Publisher. Without computers, 1/2 a class period would have been swallowed in direct instruction for this part of the project. With computers students could watch (and rewatch) at their leisure.
2. Source sharing: With laptops students were able to share websites and info with each other and different classes on a google doc. They developed all sorts of NETSy skills like information processing, vetting sources, and online collaboration. Without computers they were stuck with the sources I found.
3. Self-paced: With laptops students could move as fast or slow as needed. They could work on it from home and if absent they could access the material from D2L. Without laptops I wouldn't have cultivated a rich D2L site for the work to be continued from home because we would rarely used D2L in the classroom.
4. Feedback: The most important function of the 1:1 classroom is the freeing up of the teacher's time for individualized feedback. I spent 5 days going from student to student, checking on individual work, giving pointers and suggestions, and keeping students on track. Every day I probably talked to every student 2-3 times. Two to three times!! Have you ever been able to give that type of feedback to every student in a non 1:1 class?

What I'm thinking about for next year

1. Online Medium - I had students submit their Microsoft Publisher files to me via dropbox on D2L and thought about grading them online but found the process to be clunky and time consuming. I also thought about putting their publisher files online via blogs but think its not very aesthetically pleasing.  What I"d like to find is an online platform that is (a) easy-to-learn (b) doesn't take the focus off the content and (c) can showcase a student's creativity. Anyone know of any?
2. Kidblog -  I'm playing around with the ideas of having every student blog about projects throughout the year. Kidblog seems to be a cool blogging service setup for teachers that makes blogging easy to manage. If I use Kidblog next year, then these brochures will definitely appear on their. Is anyone using a blogging platform they would recommend?