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 PFL IV - Projeto Sua Cidade e Seu País As part of learning Portuguese as a foreign language, students often create products that provide an insight into the culture that they bring to Graded.  There is therefore an untapped richness  of resources that relate to the idea of "intercultural competence" indicated in our mission statem ent. I believe that access to such products  can help our community better understand the different cultural experiences at Graded.                     PFL II - Projeto Roupas do Mundo Take a look at some of these projects below: Projeto Cidade Seul: Uma cidade dos nosso sonhos Cartagena: Colômbia Canadá Projeto Roupas Tradicionais Roupas Tradicionais India & Africa do Sul Coréia França, Estados Unidos e Brasil Argentina, Estados Unidos e Brasil

After publishing online newspapers, the PFL V class has now made available to the wider audience an online magazine with fictional news articles. The magazine is called "A Tela" which means "screen" in English, as a way to represent the different news you may see on TV or computer screens. The magazine has three separate sections:  Recent Events, Science & Technology, Culture & Travel. Anyone can read the articles and make comments by accessing the publication at the Issuu site shown below. The class worked collaboratively to develop the design style of the magazine and some students created the cover. A Google Presentation file was used to house all the articles under the same design, so each student was responsible for copying a master slide and adding his o her own content. A PDF version of this Google Presentation was then uploaded into Issuu, making the online magazine very easy to do. You can access the magazine below. A snapshot of students'commen...

In Ceramics, a reflection journal practice that has been done on paper is now transferred to the online world. Ms Ariani asked her students to create individual blogs to host their journal reflections. The advantage of an online reflection journal is first of all to the students, as they will collect an easily accessible and shareable portfolio of their progress as artists. There is also the advantage of being able to easily illustrate their reflections with pictures of their final work and work in progress. Students can also add links to resources and research they may have done for the work, making such background information easily available not only for the reader but also for the student. The power of seeing one's own work nicely displayed and easily accessible cannot be underestimated. Apart from that, the fact that students can start to see each other's journals can be a powerful way to encourage more reflection and also positive critique. So we will be looking forward t...

Gamification means applying certain gaming elements to the teaching and learning process. It appears at the Horizon Report 2013 as one of the technologies that will have a strong impact in higher education in the near future. Graded's Innovate 2013 Conference hosted some gamification sessions and our Biology 9 teacher, Ms. Beck, was excited with the concept therefore deciding to apply it in her DNA Genetics Unit. Two elements of gaming that are very important and actually mix together involve " storytelling " and " challenge ".  In a game, a fantasy aspect is key to transport the player to another world where a challenge will take place. Below, you will see the storytelling and the challenge for the DNA Genetics Unit. It involves groups of students trying to unlock the secrets of DNA, which takes us to other elements of gaming which are " cooperation " and " competition ". The competition element in the DNA unit involves cooperation within g...

The IB Spanish and French classes started blogs and sites this year. For both Spanish and French, students created their own blogs to start posting different types of writing. We discussed blog style, digital footprints, citation of images and comment guidelines. Next semester the student work will evolve to reading each other's posts and making comments. For French 1 and 2, which are more focused on the oral language, students recorded their own voices based on biographical dialogues. These recordings were made directly on SoundCloud, which allows for easy embedding of the recording anywhere. You can see below an image of the class Google Site where students posted their SoundCloud recordings. Guillermo and Cris Matheus report that students are excited about writing on the blog and they can already see how it will become a portfolio for their language writing. The ICT Standard covered is Communication and Collaboration:  "Students use digital media and environments to communi...

Every year, the Junior's TOK classes record their "This I Believe" project into a website. The students have to speak for a few minutes about a belief while recording their voice. Their speeches are really worth listening to. The voice recordings can be accessed at the "This I Believe" site link below. Just click on the student picture to play. The words at the top pf each student represent the main idea of the belief. This year, students recorded on their own laptops at home. Mac users recorded with Garageband and PC users recorded with Audacity , which is a free recording software. The ICT Standard for this project is Communication and Collaboration "b. Communicate information and ideas effectively to multiple audiences using a variety of media formats". This I Believe

In HS Math, Ange Molony and Lauren Poll asked their students to create screencasts to explain problems and concepts to their peers. The collection of screencasts was posted on the class website as a resource bank for study. Those screencasts were graded based on very detailed rubrics involving expectations around mathematical processes and communication, for example. In Grade 9 Algebra, students created their screencasts during class choosing among a variety of recording options. As seen on the image to the left, some students used  QOMO tablets  to help with free hand writing of the formulas. We had 4 tablets available for the class. Other students chose to use the mouse over a PowerPoint where formulas were already typed. These examples and the others mentioned can be seen on the videos below. In IB Math Studies, students created screencasts over a software emulator for a TI 84 Graphing Calculator. In this case, no free handwriting was necessary which mad...