The Herd's Point of View: A student-produced podcast

 The Binscarth Grade 7 and 8 class has been hard at work tackling the project of producing a podcast episode.  The Herd's Point of View Episode 1 was released May 8th and I'm really proud of the work these students have done for this project!  Miss Payne invited me to her ELA class to help out with this project and I was so glad to be involved.  I witnessed some awesome teamwork as this class planned, created and promoted their podcast.  

You can listen to their episode "Things Parents Don't Understand" which is all about sleep.  

Episode summary: We discussed one of the issues we feel our parents don’t understand, why teenagers need to sleep in on the weekends. We debated all kinds of questions to do with the topic and even got the parents’ opinions.

Creating a Podcast

If you've ever wondered what's involved with producing a podcast, here are some of the tasks this team of students tackled during this project:

• Listening to other podcasts to identify common features of podcasts
• Brainstorming topic ideas and narrowing it down 
• Creating a vision for the podcast including a theme and title
• Deciding on a target number of episodes and a release schedule 
• Scripting or outlining the episode, including planning for guests or interviews
• Naming the podcast and episode
• Recording episode(s)
• Creating an intro and outro to add to each episode
• Editing episode(s)
• Writing an episode summary and/or show notes
• Designing cover art
• Creating a promotional plan to share the podcast
• Releasing the podcast and sharing it!

Technology Tools for a Podcasting Project

The Herd's Point of View podcast production team used the following tech tools:

• Google Docs: for editing shared files when planning and scripting
• WeVideo: for recording and editing the intro, outro and episode
• Canva: for designing the cover art and promotional materials 
• Anchor FM:  Miss Payne used a free Anchor FM account to publish the finished episode

Student Ownership

One of the great things I observed when I visited the Grade 7 and 8s during this project was how they took ownership of their work. Students were assigned different roles (based on their preferences) such as scripting, recording, editing or promotion. One student might be working on the script for the episode, while another designed promotional graphics and someone else was creating the intro audio.  All of the students were involved in initial planning and all of them took part in recording the episode.  From my visits to the classroom, I could see that each student took responsiblity for their task(s) in order for the project to succeed. 

Scavenger Hunts with Seesaw

 More and more teachers in our school division are using Seesaw with students.  Seesaw is a great tool to use for collecting student work samples in a digital portfolio (or learning journal, as Seesaw calls it).  Teachers can also create or source activities for students to complete in Seesaw, which was super helpful during remote learning and continues to be useful for classroom learning activities.  

I've found some good Seesaw scavenger hunt activities created by other teachers and now created some of my own templates to share with colleagues as well.  The concept of a scavenger hunt works well for any grade level and subject area because you can customize your list of scavenger hunt items to whatever skills or knowledge your students are working on.  

I like that these Scavenger Hunt activities allow students to apply their skills and knowledge by finding examples of the concepts they've been working with.  I also like that there are many ways for students to show their examples: they could take a picture, write with the pens, type their response or even take a video.  

Examples of Seesaw Scavenger Hunts:

click the links to find these activities and creators on Seesaw

Math Scavenger Hunt 
by Leah Obach

3D Shapes Scavenger Hunt Activity
by Kirsten Lofton

Text Features Scavenger Hunt
by Mary Klempke 

Colour Scavenger Hunt

by Ronit Shapiro

Seesaw Templates for Creating a Scavenger Hunt

I like to keep a template that I can copy and edit in Seesaw to make new scavenger hunts for different grade levels or subjects. I've created a single page or multipage template, both of which you can access below! You can customize an activity by following the steps here.  

Single Page Scavenger Hunt Template

Multipage Scavenger Hunt Template

I'm pleased to be part of the Seesaw Ambssador program and I'm happy to share about this tool with my teacher friends and colleagues!  Find me on social if you have questions or would like to connect.

Connect with Leah online:

Twitter: @LeahO77 

Instagram: @kgeducation.ca @mrsobach

Facebook: @kgeducation.ca

Inside the Mailbox: a student-created book!

 I'm very excited to share this masterpiece on my blog!  The Grade 7 & 8 class at Decker School just released a book called "Inside the Mailbox".  The book was written and illustrated by this talented group of students over the past several weeks.  It began back in January when we read "The Day the Crayons Quit" by Drew Daywalt and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers.  

I was inspired to share this book with students and teachers after seeing Ms. McLauchlan's suggestion for using it as a writing prompt.  The read aloud definitely sparked a wonderful writing project in this case.  Students brainstormed different possessions that might have complaints and then narrowed it down to the four "characters" for their book.  Their teacher, Elias Wipf, supported them with the writing process as they drafted and revised letters from the perspective of each possession.  Each student wrote 4 letters from their selected item.  They also drew incredible illustrations to match.  The letters and illustrations were put together using Mixbook.com, which is a tool designed for digital scrapbooking, but allowed for the students to have a digital book that could be professionally printed.  

I visited the student-authors this week and was thrilled to see this incredible book they've created together!  They have given me permission to share their work and I hope that so many other people will enjoy reading their book too. View it here!  

Six Word Memoirs

I've been sharing this Six Word Memoir learning activity created by Sarah Landis & Lisa Highfill with my colleagues.  I've also tried it out with a few classes and found it to be an engaging writing activity with some great options for infusing technology.  If you want to try this out, use the link to Landis & Highfill's hyperdoc above to get started!   

When I shared this activity in classrooms, we began by viewing a moving video called "The Conditioned" which is about a man named Raimundo and his life.  I've watched it several times now and it's super powerful every time.  

Students were then tasked with developing a six-word memoir to describe Raimundo's life.  Some of our Park West School Division students posted their completed memoirs to Padlet, so you can see samples  below:

Next, students thought about their own lives and wrote six word memoirs for themselves.  This was a bit more challenging, but students came up with some excellent memoirs to highlight their lives.  Once they'd chosen their six words, students designed a digital poster to share their memoirs.  Some classes used  Google Slides to put together their images and text and other classes used Canva to design their digital posters.  They turned out to be beautiful pieces of work and several students agreed to let me share their memoirs.  You can see some student samples below, courtesy of Mr. Baskerville's Grade 6 class and Mrs. Bowley's Grade 6/7 class.  

Cookies for Tanzania: A service learning project & video contest winner!

Congratulations to the Decker Colony School students in Mr. Elias Wipf's ELA class for winning the Next Vista for Learning Service via Video contest!  Their wining video, Cookies for Tanzania, tells the story of how their school has been supporting projects in Tanzania through their fundraising efforts over the past few years. This contest was created to encourage young people to "tell stories of people serving their communities" through video creation. 

The Cookies for Tanzania fundraiser sales were put on hold this year due to COVID, but this group of students found a way to continue contributing to the cause by raising awareness with their video.  Four students collaboratively planned and created the video, including sourcing images, writing a script and narrating the video to tell their story.  They also worked with students, parents and community members to obtain the permissions required for people appearing in the video.  The resulting video is a great showcase for this service learning project -- be sure to watch it below!

The video is now featured in the Next Vista for Learning video library.  

Congratulations to Matt, Gabe, Jesse and Abby on a job well done and to Elias for supporting his students in their video production project!

Global Read Aloud 2020: Student-hosted Twitter Chats

 For Global Read Aloud this fall, I had the pleasure of working with staff and students at Miniota School to host Twitter Chat discussions about their books.  Mrs. Tynelle Graham's Grade 3/4 class hosted two chats about Planet Omar: Accidental Trouble Magnet.  Ms. Stacy Paull's Grade 5/6 class hosted a chat discussing Indian No More.  Mrs. Tricia Lelond's Grade 7/8 class hosted a Twitter Chat for Prairie Lotus.

Before the Chat
I met with each class for a planning session prior to the date of the live chat.  Each group of students brainstormed discussion questions and then narrowed it down to a rich question set for the Twitter chat.  The question prep led to lots of great discussion before the "official chat" even began.  The Grades 5-8 students used a Canva template I'd created to prepare the graphics for each question.  We Tweeted out the question graphics ahead of time for any classes wanting to prepare answers before the live discussion and shared the details for our chat in hopes that lots of other teachers and classrooms would join in.

Students also prepared their own answers to the questions for the chat, so they'd be well-prepared to participate in the discussion and share their ideas.  Some students wrote their answers on sticky notes to be photographed and Tweeted during the chat and some (older) students typed their answers in a Google Doc to be copied into a Tweet during the chat. 

On the day of the chat, each class developed a schedule for posting questions within their one hour live chat time.  Each class designated a couple of students to Tweet out the questions at the scheduled times...and they were very precise about following their planned schedule! 

During the Twitter Chat
During the live chat time, students had a few roles:

(1) Designated students posted the question graphics at the planned times with question numbers and a reminder to use the chat hashtag.

(2) All students posted their own responses to the questions.  Students answered 1-3 of the questions and the class made sure someone contributed their ideas to the chat for every question.  (ie:  Student A might have wrote an answer for questions 1, 2, 3 and Student B might have Tweeted their answers to questions 4, 5 and 6).  

(3) As a class, students worked together to moderate the chat and reply to other participating classes.  The teacher in each room used TweetDeck to follow the chat hashtag and projected their screen so all students could see the Tweets coming in.  Classes composed their responses together, with the teacher typing and sending Tweets that they could all view.

After the Chat

Tweets continued to come in after the live chat time, so classes continued to moderate and respond to messages on Twitter.  

It was a lot of fun to be involved with these student-hosted Twitter Chats.  The students did an excellent job of planning and hosting!  I hope it's something I'll get to experience again!

Tech Tips: Quick Communication with G Suite

Today, students are returning to school here in Manitoba.  It's exciting to be back, but also a very different back to school experienc given that we are teaching and learning during a pandemic.  This school year, I'll continue to serve as the Literacy with ICT Teacher Leader for Park West School Division.  In this role, I support students and teachers in using technology for education.  It's an awesome job and I'm very excited to be back at school!

Our school division is currently using G Suite for Education.  I wanted to share a couple of tips for quick communication using Gmail and Google Classroom.

(1)  Use labels for your email contacts to make it quick and easy to email a group of parents, students or colleagues.

For example, I might create a label called "Parents 2020-2021".  I can label all contacts for parents & guardians of that class.  Then, when I go to compose an email, I simply type the label name "Parents 2020-2021" into the TO or BCC field of my email to message all parents at once.  

Note:  When you are emailing a group, using the BCC field to send a blind carbon copy is good email etiquette so that you are not sharing contact information with others.  The BCC field prevents other recipients from seeing email addresses that the message is being sent to. 

The instructions for using labels are here 

(2) If you are using Google Classroom, you can quickly email students and guardians from the "People" tab.  

Once you have invited students to Google Classroom, you can easily contact individual students, multiple students on your class list or your entire class.  Similarly, once guardians have signed up with their student, you can also email them using the list in Google Classroom.  

The instructions for emailing students, guardians and co-teachers in Google Classroom are here.