As teachers begin to prepare for the new school year, part of the planning is what to do in those first days of school. There are some things that will always be there: discussing the rules, getting equipment and supplies marked and put away, obtaining signatures on forms, etc., but outside of those things, there must be activities to get the school year started off right.
One of the ways to get students back into the habit of using technology in meaningful ways (they've had a whole summer of texting, video games, and mp3 players), is to integrate technology into back-to-school lessons. I will list five of my favorite back-to-school technology activities in this article. Feel free to add comments with yours and visit the links at the bottom of the article for more ideas.
1. Animoto. This free web-based application allows students to create visually stimulating and exciting videos. Have students make an Animoto video that introduces themselves to the rest of the class or reveals where they spent their summer vacation. One thing I like to do is to make my own as an example and see how many things they get correct by watching - then point out the things they got wrong by making assumptions about the picture. In science classrooms, this can be especially helpful toward getting students started thinking about making educated observations instead of assumptions.
2. Google Earth. Another free web-based application, Google Earth has multiple uses in the classroom. How about having students create a Google Earth "trip" that shows where they went over summer vacation, or where they were born, grew up, and/or have gone to school? Students can creat placemarks in each location and add images, text, video, or audio to create a virtual trip for the rest of the class. See the sites at the bottom of this article for how-to help. One note about Google Earth, it can be bandwidth intensive.
3. This next activity was suggested to me by lorir on Twitter: Use Wordle to have students create an "all about me" graphic to post on a board (electronic or traditional). Wordle is a free web-based site that allows students to upload text of any kind and a graphic is generated that uses the words in the text. The larger the word in the graphic, the more frequently it was used. I created the picture on this article by uploading the text of the article to Wordle.
4. Have students create podcasts to introduce themselves. Be creative with this. If you group students, they could do it like a newscast or set it up like the interview of a famous person. If students create individual podcasts, you could play each for the class and have them guess who made it using the clues in the podcast. Audacity is a free program that enables students to create podcasts complete with background music and effects, as well as multiple tracks of voices.
5. If digital storytelling will be a large part of your classroom during the school year, you might want to do a quick lesson on digital storytelling. One of my favorites is to break the class into groups of four. Each group has to use six pictures to create a story in Photostory 3, a free program available for Windows. The catch is that the entire class has the same six pictures. This is a cool way to introduce them to the easy-to-use Photostory, and to help them learn about what a difference perspective makes in what a set of pictures could mean. No two stories will be alike. If you teach in a school where digital storytelling has already been a part of your students experiences, you could begin the year with the "Door Scene" from the American Film Institute (AFI) curriculum "Lights, Camera, Education!" This activity is more intensive and will require more than one class period to complete.
Whatever you decide to do, making the return to school exciting and engaging for students will make it exciting and engaging for teachers, as well! Teachers, post your own technology-rich back-to-school activities by adding a comment to this post.
For more info:
Collection of back-to-school technology lessons
Embedding multimedia in Google Earth placemarks
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