Making podcasts into avatars

After the students have mastered their book reviews, we are going to be creating our own individual avatars using voki.com to present our book talks to the class. I created my voki and reviewed the book "The True Story of the Three Little Pigs" by Jon Scieszka. Click on the link below to see the example that I created.

Reflection Is Key

After working with these students over the past couple weeks I have tweaked my ideas and taken a whole new spin on the project! Instead of focusing on ALL aspects of the writing process, I decided to narrow it down and focus on three aspects. These aspects include: idea generation, organization, and summarizing. I noticed that my students were having difficulties getting their ideas straight while trying to summarize their book reviews. I have created an inquiry for this project. My question is: How does the creation and sharing of digital booktalks by high-acheiving second graders influence their writing in terms of idea generation, organization, and summarizing?

I have created a many documents that have helped them in this process. First of all, I have created a data table where they include information about their book. This is a table with places for them to write the plot, genre, characters, opinion, problem, etc. They then are able to write their booktalk. I used this information to guide them in the right direction. After they write their book review, I have them record it. After they record it, they will listen to it and self-critique themselves using a rubric. They loved this and were so honest with themselves. I was very proud and continually see them moving forward in the process. After they critique themselves they set goals for the next time! I personally believe that self-critiquing and setting goals is so important in the learning process.

What's the point?

As I've been trying to find a way to incorporate technology into a high achieving second grade reading group, many different aspects have come to mind. There are so many differing aspects of technology that I want to implement in this classroom. After much research, I figured out the perfect idea! I will be using podcasting and self critiquing strategies to help these students improve on their writing and fluency skills!

This blog is used to monitor the success of these second grade students. They are getting the opportunity to write book reviews and use podcasts to record them. After they use the podcasts, they will be using self critiquing strategies to improve on the six traits of writing. The six traits include: ideas, sentence fluency, organization, word choice, voice, and conventions. Not only will they be using a rubric for the six traits, but they will be using a checklist to make sure that they are staying on track.

I am very eager to start this project tomorrow and cannot wait to see the results! I will soon upload the rubric and the checklist before beginning my data collection. Tomorrow I will collect pre-data in order to monitor the progress of these students throughout the next couple months.