Student as Creator

During the 2013-2014 school year I created a weebly.com site that used- it has several different projects and assignments that students were required to complete... along with all of my resources to teach the course, so I will be pulling some of these assignments from that site. If anyone is interested in visiting that site the URL is: www.mrscdeck.weebly.com

Student #1:
http://storybird.com/books/declaration-of-independence-14/?token=5v7g5c9865

8th grade: This project was also included in my UDL lesson plans. The students were given 12 excerpts from the Declaration of Independence in which the students were to translate these very complex excerpts into everyday terms. In addition to their decoding, the students were asked to take it a step further and create a storybook appropriate for a 3rd grader about the Declaration of Independence. I learned a lot from this assignment! I used www.storybird.com for the students to create their online books. I should have required the students to make their excerpts into an actual story rather than just putting their excerpts on a page and calling it a day- because this example doesn't really explain much. I used this example, even though it wasn't my strongest because I learned how to re-shape my lesson for the future using technology to enrich the assignment. However, my finished project may have not turned out perfectly, because the students and I worked together on decoding the Declaration of Independence and creating something from that, the students were more enthusiastic about the Declaration.

Student #2
https://www.smore.com/qhcf-shintoism?ref=email

7th grade: This assignment was given as an introduction to major religions in Southern and Eastern Asia. Students were allowed to choose from: Buddhism, Shintoism, Islam, Confucianism, and Hinduism. They completed a short web quest in which they were to create a www.smore.com about their religion. Once they completed the web quest and created a project, I posted the best assignments to my website in which the students used their peers projects to complete a chart about all of the religions. This assignment worked really well as a introduction to this confusing (to a 7th grader) and interesting world religions.

Student #3
http://big-man-site.weebly.com/delta-airlines.html

8th grade: So I thought of this great assignment where I would have the students develop their own weebly for Georgia Studies. This student began the process of doing so. The assignment shown here was a research project about Georgia Entrepreneurs, so he researched the company Delta Airlines. If you click on his links at the top, he does have some other assignments linked to this page. Due to internet issues and password issues, I did not quite follow through with this huge project. The idea also came to me during 2nd semester, so many of the students had forgotten where their assignments were and unable to upload them to the weebly. However, weebly is a kid-friendly site where the students could make online portfolios for their courses. That was the original intent... which would have  a great resource for the students.

Many of these ideas were my first attempts at implementing this into my content, so I learned several lessons which has allowed me to reflect on the specifics of many assignments.