Feature Artifact!

The Artifact which best represents our Synergy Projects this year is the powerpoint presentation which was created by our Earth Science class
and shown to elementary students. We love that it features much of the photography our students
took and adds the information from our Earth Science students. We love that it explains our field trip around town and connects to places that the elementary students have visited. We love that it is efficient and informative and beautiful!

We don't love that it doesn't capture the feeling in the room when we presented it, because it couldn't. Our students were electric before, during, and after the presentations and you can't show that with a powerpoint. We don't love that it doesn't include all of the amazing activites our kids came up with, but that wouldn't fit on a powerpoint and neither would the great conversations and laughs and awesome elementary energy.

So, we love it and we don't, but just because there is so much more we would love to share if we could.

Next Year!

As we wind down the school year, we start thinking about what to do next. I was thinking about a project for next year that would be a great application for a Synergy project but became concerned that the application date had probably passed when I realized that I don't need to apply because we already have the equipment! I think that speaks to the level of support we have received along the way, however; we definitely benefited from all the conversations and guidance we had and it would be difficult to recreate the process as just one school.

My idea was to first visit the Nanaimo Museum to learn about Japanese internment (there is a feature exhibit on now: http://nanaimomuseum.ca/exhibits-collections/feature-exhibit-gallery/). Like one of our Synergy Project peers, we would visit the archives and find photos of Japanese salteries and other buildings or culture, then travel by kayak to Newcastle Island and visit the site of old Japanese herring salteries (http://vi-asiancanadians.ca/2015/09/17/the-japanese-on-newcastle-island-years-of-salt-and-herring/). I imagine we could try to recreate photos of the locations then and now and display them side by side. 

This would be a great Social Studies 10 project which would allow students to explore a variety of curricular competencies in great depth. Perhaps we will be able to take it on!

Report Progress

Best laid plans!

We had originally planned to create a slideshow with voiceover for our final report, so that we could highlight our student photography while also giving all of the information that we wanted to include in a format that worked well for other schools wanting to take on something similar.

We also have the opportunity, however, to present our project at our district's inquiry sharing this week; this format will require us to have something people can view in person and a narrated video isn't great for that because it would be so hard to hear. Because of this, we are building a text-heavy powerpoint, one that is meant more for printing and viewing as a booklet than as a presentation, to share our story and images. A little preview is below; hopefully it all comes together well!

Report Road Map

Our team is currently in the early stages of creating our final report, but we have come up with what we think are some pretty solid concepts to move forward with and are excited at the prospects of pulling this together.

The first thing that is important to our group is to include some of the great student work in our final report. For us, that is probably going to mean including a slideshow of some of the great images our students produced on their field trips and some of the poetry they have written. In order to best include and leverage this for our report, we are leaning towards recording a voiceover to go with the images and create a video for our final presentation.

While this will be a great way for us to provide the information we need, we also want it to be as easy as possible for a future team to use our information to implement a similar project. In order to accomplish this, we will also (likely!) have a written explanation which will go into greater depth in some of the more content-heavy areas. 

Finally, it is important to us to include our artifacts in the presentation; a lot of them have been posted in the blog above, but we'll track down some more too. Hopefully by using a variety of methods we can both highlight the impressive work our students have complete and make it easy-ish for another team to replicate this in the future.

The Geotour Video!

One of our students edited this video of our GeoTour field trip. Though this was not the final product for everyone, we think it represents a great artifact and shows a cool part of our progress through this project.

Artifacts

Not only has our school finished our first project, the Earth Science/Photography collaboration, we are also most of the way through our Poetry Map project, with all field trips for that project also completed. We have a lot of different classes involved, with a lot of different goals, and that means a lot of different assessment strategies! Great ideas and conversations are swirling around our school lately.

For Earth Science, we have tried to be as direct as possible. The task was broken down into small steps, each of which were assessed individually. This allowed students to feel small successes along the way to achieving a larger goal. When it came to the end of the project, students compiled their small steps and had all of the information needed to produce a quality product. 

Photography students had a much simpler task for the GeoTour project; working as a photographer, they produced images to meet the goals of the client, the Earth Science class. Students were assessed using a rubric and reflection form (pictured above) that they were familiar with. This made for really valuable discussion about how the assignment was similar and different from previous ones, and how the client relationship effected this. 

The Poetry Map project is in the final stretch with students from grade 8-11 at our school. This has meant a variety of assessment tools and strategies as expectations increase through those grades; above is an outline and rubric that a teacher used with Grade 9s. Using different criteria and assessment strategies with different grades has allowed us to include much of our school in the activity and produce different products from one experience. Seeing the variety of interpretations has been enriching for our whole school. 

Lots of learning has happened and been assessed in different ways through these projects, touching almost all students in our school. 

All the Assessment

The first half of our project has had both formative and summative assessment. From the beginning of the project, students reflected daily on their accomplishments, challenges, and goals. It was a shared document within google classroom, allowing me to give feedback along the way. I also had a “To-Do” list for students to check off when they’d completed a task – be it submitting research notes, slides, demonstration ideas, etc. There was always a sense of accountability that drove students. Because students were going to be creating a video documentary and presenting their project to local elementary schools, they were working towards mastery – not just completion. Everyone’s contribution to the final product was of course assessed, but the journey to the final product was where the learning was happening.

Without the Go-Pros, the students wouldn’t have felt the same excitement. They came up with incredible ideas because they knew they had the tools to carry their ideas forward. They pushed the boundaries of creativity because they were inspired by the technology at hand. The effectiveness of the project was extremely obvious. We had students who were often absent, showing up for class. We had students who struggled to speak in front of classmates, taking leadership roles. The best part was seeing students who had disengaged, engaging with the technology. They divided and conquered, each student seeming to find their specialty. The real proof of success for me was, on a day that students technically did not have class, my entire Earth Science 11 class showed up to do a full day field trip to present their Nanaimo Geology Tour project to local elementary students. J

(by Aeron Reid)