Using Digital Story Telling

Starting this school year, our K4 through 2nd grade classrooms started using a new reading curriculum.  It is a very well thought out curriculum with some wonderful components to teaching the skills and concepts to be great readers…however, it only goes through 2nd grade.  So over the summer, my third grade team met to revamp our reading curriculum, from scratch.  We looked at all the resources we have gathered and used over the years and looked at the new Common Core to see what materials best fit these areas and standards that we need to be teaching.  We have found this process to be very exciting because we, ourselves, have found a new excitement and enjoyment out of teach reading again because it is fun, appropriate concepts, however, frustrated because of the lack of assessments that are here, ready to use.  We have spent a lot of time thinking about what we want to see from our students and discussing the fact that it isn't reasonable to expect that we create a brand, spanking new (traditional) assessment for each book/story/topic/skill, so threw around the idea of project based assessments.  This way, the framework can be applied to many areas of study, not just reading, and can allow students to show what they know in ways that they feel more comfortable doing and allow them to be more creative and individual.  Using digital story telling will be a great way to assess their knowledge and understanding in so many areas that we will have to sit down and look at the best places to use it.

Advanced Organizers & Nonlinguistic Representation

This week's chapters and discussions brought out a few fun ideas that I would like to incorporate into the upcoming school year.  Our team is about half way through "creating" a reading/language arts curriculum based off of the new Common Core standards and about to start thinking about what we want our assessments to look like.  There is a big interest to do more project-based assessments because it results in  a much higher interest level and in turn, produces a much better product.  However, with testing being such  a highly regarded measure of comprehension and understanding, we will have to included standard assessments simply to give the students practice at completing them.  As I was reading through the chapters and thinking about some answers to the group response questions, I got some really fun ideas for assessment options.  I would really like to find an opportunity for our students to create a board game, produce a digital summary (digital storytelling) of a topic or story, and even make a scrapbook.

Using advanced organizers is also something that I know I use, but feel that I will be making a more concerted effort to focus on and use on purpose.  I wasn't aware of the wide variety of materials that were seen as, and can be used as, an organizer.  There are a lot of ways to edit and alter already created materials to fit the purpose of an organizer, and would produce a much stronger lesson and understanding by the student(s).