By David Carroll
Each year, my students work on a final project that is centered on their goals for post-secondary transition. The project is their opportunity to articulate their vision for life after high school, as well as the steps they are taking or still need to take in order to achieve that vision. In the past, the project inevitably took the form of a PowerPoint, despite my half-hearted efforts to encourage students to branch out.
This year, I posed the project as a design problem to students: I explained that as teachers, we get stuck in our methods, that our intentions are good, but we need help staying current sometimes. I showed them the format of a visual transition plan (an excellent tool for one-on-one transition planning, but difficult to scale to whole-class work), and I asked them to help me redesign the transition plan process in a way that would be relevant to them and their lives. After brainstorming ideas that ranged as far as youtube mentor texts (e.g. “draw my life”), web comics, and of course, Snapchat, we settled on a list of formats that we wanted to explore further as a group. Then, I did my homework and came up with a menu of different presentation applications for students to play with. We had a “Sandbox Day,” in which students collaboratively fiddled and played with various tools grouped by theme into four Sandboxes that ranged from comics/animations to graphic design to stop-motion movies and web-based presentation apps. Students spent an entire block trying out tools, creating sample texts, and evaluating what they liked and disliked about each one. Finally they selected their preferred format and began a deep dive into composing the content for their presentations.
The content for each of their presentations was the product of teacher-created questions, storyboard templates, and action-plan templates that students completed over the course of two weeks. They reflected deeply on their goals in different domains of life and then analyzed the steps necessary to go from their present progress to the stated goal. Finally, after reviewing the rubric for evaluation criteria, the students took to the computers to design their final presentations using the apps they selected. The finished products ranged from a series of images designed for Instagram to short animated videos to powtoons, (And yes, there were even a few PowerPoints in the end, but they at least had multimedia components to them!). I am proud of the way my students pushed themselves to think critically about their futures and to collaborate using new tech tools in the process.
Spend some time “playing” in each sandbox to decide what form you want your transition presentation to take. Fill out the feedback form with reflection ?’s for your daily grade.Sandbox #1: Creating your own cartoon or comichttp://www.dvolver.com/moviemaker/index.html
Comic Life (App available on AISD Computers)
Sandbox #2: Creating a movie or stop-motion (Can you add to this list??)Stop Motion Café (free app for phone)
Frame x Frame by Joby (free app for phone)
iMovie (free app for iPhone or iPad)
Windows Movie Maker (free app on desktop computers)
Sandbox # 3: Creating images, infographics, or social media postshttps://www.canva.com/
Sandbox # 4: Creating a digital presentation:https://prezi.com/
Sway (Microsoft Office)
Power Point (Microsoft Office), [Does not count for sandbox activity]