Ant Farm

While we aren't getting an ant farm for the classroom, we are starting to read about the colonies. I'm particularly excited about it because of how I am planning to integrate technology. Previously I had kids read about 8 different explorers then compare them, and present a "Best Explorer" project. The project was done entirely paperless, and it worked out very well (albeit a little long because of snow). The products that the kids made were great, accomplishing the objective of comparing and contrasting explorers based on particularly information areas (background, motives, impact on native people). Kids also, for the most part, did a nice job making clear evaluations of who was best and why. Those that didn't were largely mired in presenting information and not connecting the dots in their presentation (not particularly egregious).

Where everything steps into high gear is with the colonies project. This will not be entirely paperless, but we'll cut back on the paper use quite a bit. My objective is for kids to analyze information describing the colonies. Working in reverse, I'll be assessing them two-fold:

1) by looking at a group (2 people to maximize participation) PhotoStory product advertising one of the colonies, and persuading people to live there (*assuming you can get in your time machine and go back to the 1600-1700's).
2) by looking at a short paragraph written independently explaining why someone would want to live in one of the other colonies (not the one they did in part one).

Assessment part one feeds into part two. They get a chance to work together in analyzing a colony in part one, which will be a more formal check for understanding. Part two allows for the kids to stand alone. We'll use the Photostory presentations as a jigsaw type of activity, which will also shorten the overall length that they need to read. Since Photostory is on each of the netbooks, I am pretty excited about how this should take off. Now I just need to create the storyboard for them to use!