Meaningful Projects and Performances

Students who are in my classroom today will already tell you that this takes place during every unit. I believe in utilizing technology to help promote meaningful learning through utilizing certain hardware such as Promethean Boards, document cameras, computers, digital cameras, and video cameras. Through these technological resources, we have already been able to create some incredible assessments.

For example, we used a Flip video camera and created a fashion show to learn about clothing, colors and designs. This was especially helpful for parents to see their students’ engaged in a meaningful way and helped open up our classroom to the outside world, while bringing positive attention to our Spanish program.

Another fabulous example is during our 3rd grade project on weather, groups had the option to create a weather report using the Flip video camera, or to use Wikispaces to create an online weather report. Both groups learned that technology could be engaging when utilized correctly within the classroom. 

Finally, a great example is a final project that the 4th grade students created. They were assigned a project to create a travel itinerary of a Spanish-speaking country. At first, we were going to use a paper pamphlet to convey the information. But then, I remembered how exciting it was to create a map that we are using to travel to Europe, to plan the entire trip using a Google Map. We implemented the Google Map to showcase our project and I showed the students how to use the application. Below is a final project of one of the groups. Not only did they learn geography of the country, they also learned how to search for flights, hotels, and things to do using travel search engines.

View Smith-Peru in a larger map

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