I don't have a classroom of my own anymore, but the week before spring break I was back in the classroom collaborating on a project with one of our teachers. He had found this great article about how the NCAA teams are selected and seated for the NCAA tournament. We decided to start with this as, he is the 8th grade math teacher, so students would work out the same formulas the selection committee work out, but then we decided to expand it from there to include a more rounded project. Here is how it took shape.
Monday - Student's work out formulas on a worksheet to understand the rating process. Students find the RPI - (Rating Percentage Index), SOS (Strength of Schedule), and WP (Winning Percentage) for a sample group of colleges. - They then draw a name of a collage from a hat - that earned their way into the tournament.
Tuesday - Let the research begin. We are a one to one school with ipads, but for this project we booked a computer lab for ease of having a keyboard. Students had to research about their school, half basketball related, half academic related. The teacher provided them with a rubric stating all of the required questions for both parts. Example questions are what is your schools RPI, what rank were they in their conference, what conference are they in, what is their mascot, who is their best player. For the academic side, students had to find out what type of institution it is, what degrees are they known for, when was the school established, where is it located, what is the size of the student body, and what is the freshman retention rate.
Wednesday and Thursday - Student continue with their research and start their creative piece. They have to design an advertising poster for their school. This flyer is to address all of the questions, therefore showing how competitive their college is both in basketball and academically. We used www.canva.com for the creation. Some of the posters blew me away. Students can be so creative if given the chance. Projects were due Thursday end of the class period.
As each period finished up their posters - they downloaded them as either a PDF or an image and shared them with Mr. Davis in their class's shared Google folder. Mr. Davis in turn shared this folder with me. I then took the PDFs and compiled a Symbaloo www.symbaloo.com for the class. This class symbaloo was then posted on the the classes MBC account for all students to see. We did this for half of the classes. The other half he shared with me and I compiled a Google slide slides.google.com presentation with the images. Since this was the first time we had done a project like this, we wanted to test a few different curation methods to see which we liked better.
Friday - was presentation day. Mr. Davis pulled up either the Symbaloo or the Google Slide and the student pointed out the main features of the design and proved that their school was the best as they answered all of the rubric requirements.
We chose Symbaloo and Google Slides for a few reasons, both were easy to work with to compile a class composite of posters. However, they required a different download from Canva. Symbaloo required a PDF by Google Slides required the image download. Both were also easy to post for the classes to see each others work. Mr. Davis also posted them for the staff to see, as he wanted to highlight some standouts in each class.
I realize this was more the teacher and I using the Symbaloo and Google slides - but now that we know the requirements for each, next year the student could straight upload their slide to the class's Google slide. Overall the project was a success and it showed off the creativity of the students.
No comments:
Post a Comment