Copy Tech is Happening @

 Last year we started exploring the idea of student digital portfolios. In English 9 students created their own Digital Portfolio Google site.They experimented embedding, linking and uploading different types of work, including Google Docs, Word Docs, scanned docs, screencasts. Visual Arts also joined in the experience including pictures of their work, reflections and art resources. This year started very busy with Grade 10 taking over the already created student portfolios and Grade 9 students started creating their own as well. Many conversations emerged about how this might look like in terms of checking progress. The English Dept  took the initiative to go for the organization of subjects under each grade level. At the image above you can see an example where the student organized the English work from last year under "Grade 9", creating new pages for "Grade 10". Visual Arts also continued using digital porfolios this year, and discussed how progress could be se...

 We kicked off the year with a technology integration partnership for using Diigo Social Bookmarking as a tool for collaboration in reading and in the development of a research databank. Caitlin decided to explore this tool that we have been talking about for some time last year right at the beginning of her new International Relations class, setting the tone for how students will manage reading. A Diigo group was created for the class and the students were invited to the group. The first activity involved using the powerful Diigo toolbar to collectively highlight an articled shared/bookmarked by the teacher. Therefore, all students in the class were able to read and highlight the same article, keeping a record of their activity for later access. The screenshot below shows the web article with highlights. The students then started their own research, adding individual bookmarks to be shared with the class. Together with the highlights, it is also possible to add "sticky notes...

In this project, Adriana Silveira asked the students to create their own poems based on  themes from the well known Brazilian poets Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Cecília Meireles and Vinicius de Moares (IB course). The theme from the poems was illustrated with pictures from the students' personal collection.  Then, an electronic magazine was created to share the student work, celebrating their sensibility and mastery of the language. By making the eMagazine public, the expectation is to open up to more viewers and invite feedback through comments on the magazine site. Students worked as a group to make decisions on the emagazine design, so you will see that each group was very creative, coming up with completely different styles. To work collaboratively, the class shared a Google Presentation where blueprint" pages were created. Then each student made a copy of the blueprint slide, changing colors and font according to the style defined by the class. A snapshot of...

The PFL IV students have worked hard on creating subtitles for a TED talk of their choice available on Youtube.   The example you see below is from the wonderful speech from Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story. The ability to listen carefully and work on finding appropriate equivalent words in another language was the focus of this activity.  Students also had to cooperate with colleagues as they split up the caption writing work among the group. In order to do that, a Google Doc was used a a shared space for work, so each student would negotiate the transition from one "translator" to the other as they split up the timing. Color coding was used by the teacher, Deborah Rebello, to help students in their writing revision. You can see a snapshot of the Google Doc below, which was created using the timing format accepted by Youtube captioning. This was also an exercise for all of us in terms of posting copyrighted material on Youtube. As the video was reposted with ...

Video is a great media to encourage student voice. In this project, students used video as a way to convince an audience of what they believed in after getting involved in  research, discussion and formal presentation. Therefore, the video was part of a long process. The importance of belief was demonstrated by a student who started researching about the use of bikes in São Paulo as a means of transportation, but then realized she did not believe it would really work out, so her focus had to be tweaked. The choice of digital tools was an important part of the project, so students were encouraged to try out different tools to express video-like motion. This resulted in the use of  SlideRocket,  iMovie and a Screencast of a Prezi presentation, as shown in the examples below. This choice of tools allowed for creativity and  innovation which is one of the standards to be used at Graded for technology integration. The combination of playback music, screencasting and ...

Along this school year, the idea of blogging and its use in the classroom has been taking shape. It started with my workshop on the use of Blogger and then some conversations began around the topic. So what we can see now at Graded is a range of  applications of the blogging concept in a variety of subject areas. Blogging has often been a tool indicated for the reflection part of an eportfolio, which on its turn is used as a vehicle for self-evaluation.  We have several teachers exploring with the idea of eportfolio, and  Felipe in  PE   has been experimenting the use of student blogs to   reflect on performance  and share assessments. They have been making video recordings of students doing fitness tests for example and sharing on the blog for student reflection and comment. So each student has a personal blog which is linked to the teacher's blog. Felipe's blog is used for sharing  news and information . One interesting shari...

I was very happy to be in Adriana Monti's  Brazilian History & Culture class for a video project she was doing on a press conference about the Kaiowa and Kaapor Indians. We had been talking for a while about some tech project possibilities, so this video project became her debut in many technological skills for which she is very proud now. The press conference was a very interesting format as she had different groups preparing to be the Indians and other groups preparing to be the press with specific questions. The pairing of Indians and press was decided on the spot and students had to go off and video record the Q&A press conference using the internalized knowledge from the research. Most groups worked independently on the video editing requiring very few tips from me. As I saw the project developing, my suggestion was to have the videos online so students could check anytime anywhere and could also make com...