Extending Your Content with Student Choice & Year End Projects

Now that the year is coming to a close and your curriculum is all but covered, you may sometimes ask yourself, "what's next?" It's been a long year and it's time to shift the tables and your assignments towards your students, giving them the opportunity to show off all the amazing things that they have learned from you through student projects! By providing students with a choice of standards, elements, apps and delivery methods, the next few weeks in your classroom can be one of high interest & engagement, application and articulation, and personalized learning for all students, yet very manageable as a teacher. With a little behavior management, the flexibility of an independent or shared opportunity to demonstrate their mastery of content will not only help keep them focused, but also help to improve their research, creativity and collaboration skills. Motivate students to work by allowing them to choose the medium and topic for which their project will be created and help others review content that has been covered throughout the year by offering student presentations or optional game play at the culmination of the project! Take a look at the variety of project ideas below and get together with your technology coach today to talk about what this looks like in your classroom!

(Your School) IDOL: Challenge students to demonstrate their mastery of content by choosing a topic they learned about this year and recreating the lyrics of a favorite song to explain what they learned about that topic. By allowing students to choose a topic they are interested in, the music they will use and the members of their group, the motivation to complete this assignment is through the roof! Provide students with guidelines such as a number of vocabulary terms that must be used within the song, samples of other content songs on teacher tube or YouTube, or even the option to perform for the class or video and play to present their learning! The last few days of your project will be very entertaining and maybe the most fun of your year! THINGLINK: We have all seen 100 different sites that we would like to use to share content with students but who has time? Well now, you do! Challenge students to pick a topic that differs from all other groups and create their own Thinglink image for a content topic you covered this year in class! Thinklink takes one anchor image and allows you to add embedded links (like targets) that can be clicked to access pop up images, text boxes, videos, websites and other digital resources like online review games & content related music! Create a class account for yourself so that all students sign in with the same login & password & change it when you are done; What a great way to organize a number of resources into one place that you can use next year for new students to review as an independent activity!

QUIA.COM: Do your students like gaming? Try out this online game site free for 30 days and allow kids to create their own review game over a content topic provided by you! Set basic guidelines like the number of questions that may be included, the choice of games to use and even the vocabulary terms that must be covered. Not only will your students have fun creating the gameswhile reviewing the content learned in class, imagine how much more they will retain while the whole class is playing their games over the next day or two! Not going digital? That's okay; provide some paper options for your students to create their own review game based on one of their family favs. The students will amaze you with their creativity while getting once more chance to review the content before they go.

STORYBIRD.COM : Now is the perfect time for your students to show off all that writing they have done all year! At Storybird.com, you can create a free class account and give students the option to publish their best three (or more) writing samples! Anchored by a simple photo to get the reader intrigued, this site allows students to type and publish their work into this online classroom that will be accessible by only you, their classmates and their parents! Students can comment and like each others work and can even build a personal library of their favorite stories written by their friends or other authors on this site.

MOVIE MAKERS UNITE! Have your students create their own podcast or movie summarizing all they know about their favorite topic. Students can summarize what they learned through writing while acting it out on Greenscreen or iMovie, or even making a simple voice over still image podcast using Shadowpuppet, Seesaw, Puppetpals or Chatterpix for a quicker & easier product.The levels and options for demonstrating mastery of content are endless!

Whatever your interest, we are here to help! Let's end the year with a little fun & some creative student work. You will be glad you did!