Crankenstein- ELA Unit
JoMarie Ventimeglia, 2nd grade teacher
For this capstone project JoMarie used the existing unit and made it more interactive by adding ed tech tools, she created an online learning module based upon a favorite 2nd grade read aloud. It was a week long – five day unit. She included videos, games, Google applications such as Google docs and Google Slides to make it fun and engaging.
The goal for this project was to engage kids with learning while making them comfortable to use educational technology tools to make learning more interesting and interactive. The lesson was created on google site which made students learn and navigate through it. During this project students created and used the google tools and saved it to their google drive. They shared their work/ document with their class and learned how to communicate using these tools. Author thought it would be difficult for younger kids to focus and sit in one place. Knowing that these students like to watch videos on youtube, she added video instructions and video clips.
Explaining tech tools to these students was not easy for these younger kids. This project was more like hands-on experience. Students used their district provided Chrome books, and as a responsible digital citizen they were taking care of these devices.It supports ISTE standard 2a. During this project students represent data in various ways to facilitate problem-solving and decision-making which is ISTE 5a. It also followed 7a by allowing students to use different digital tools to communicate.
For the first day students were asked to listen to the audiobook Crankenstien and to check students’ understanding they played Kahoot at the end of the session. On the second day students vocabulary words from the story were tested on google forms. Third day students watched another video “What is an adjective?” and came up with a few adjective words followed by the Blooket game. Next day students watched the BrainPop Jr. about writing a paragraph and created a google document to write a paragraph.On the last day students watched a video about how to draw Crankenstein and used Flipgrid to share the picture that they drew and explained the paragraph they wrote on day four. After they watched each other’s videos, they commented on it.This made them aware of responsible and respectful digital learners.
This was a great project for younger kids using several ed tech tools for their classroom learning.