Innovative Teaching with Technology

What I have learned:
The major project I did with my students in this grant was to help the students create and interactive quiz of sorts on insects. They had studied insects in science and one of the objectives was to have them learn the 3 parts of the insect body: head thorax and abdomen.

We integrated this technology lesson with both art and science and even math. Each student picked an insect to study and write a report about. They also drew a sketch of the insect in Art and then attached a resistor at each of the main parts of the insect.  Why the resistor you might ask? Well this is where the technology came in. The students then drew the insect using Scratch.

As the student started to learn more about Scratch they also learned that they could control things with a Scratch/Pico board. They learned that this board could be used to collect information from light, a sound level (their favorite), a clicker, a slider and alligator clips (current). They learned (and so did I) that different resistors have different numbers (levels of resistance).

 Together we learned how to put the scripts together to allow a person to touch the resistor with alligator clips to close a circuit. When the circuit was closed the insect displayed on the screen would let the user see the word for that body part. About 7 of the 22 students in the class got this far. Most had gotten to the point where if they clicked on the screen the part would say its name on the screen.

What I learned:
•That a project like this takes a lot longer than even I expected. Only having lab once a week for 50 minutes is not enough. We spent about 5 weeks in the lab, plus extra time in the classroom.
• I now know which math concepts I need to be sure that the students understand if we are going to use Pico boards and resistors again. (Which I will in the future.)
• Students need a very good grasp of the < and > sign. This is a very difficult sign for second graders. They also need to be able to figure out which numbers are higher and lower than a given number.
• The students enjoyed the challenge and want lots of explore time.
• I need to more of a risk taker like the students when using the Scratch program.

 
Next steps:
We are starting a project for a literature book we are reading. The students will create an interactive version of the story for one of Jan Brett’s books. (Maijune taught the first class to get us started; now I will take over the rest of the teaching and guiding.)  I am not sure we will use the Pico boards for this one just yet. I need to think about this a while. The nice thing about this project is I can have the students working on it in the classroom during reading because of the lit connection.  I expect the project to take most of April and maybe early May.