Birthday Research Project - VIDEOS

I am so proud of these kiddos for their hard work this week in creating their Birthday Research Project posters. The excitement is seriously so addicting!! This year, as an added bonus, students were excited to draw pictures to go with their projects. Middle School is such a weird transition for kids. Students sometimes start to think that drawing and coloring are for elementary and lose interest in this task. However, my group this year was ran with it, which is AWESOME!! This allowed for so much more creativity in their projects!

As an extension to the project this year, I offered students the option of creating a video of their posters. Since students will present the posters to their classmates, this gives students too shy to speak in front of their classmates the ability to still present the awesome stuff they learned! Instead of these students standing up and presenting, I'll show their videos. I love the fact that technology has enabled us to do so many things and adapt accordingly for our students varying needs.

Our Digital Learning Coach was gracious enough to help the students in creating their videos since they needed a quiet environment to do so. I absolutely love having a go-to person on our campus for ideas. I asked him about a way that students could record a video of their projects, and he ran with it. Having this support is incredible and so helpful! We used iPads and the app: Explain Everything to create the videos. According to their description in the App store, "Explain Everything is an easy-to-use design, screencasting, and interactive whiteboard app with real-time collaboration that lets you animate, record, annotate, collaborate, and explore ideas, knowledge and understanding." Students worked in the hallways to create images of their project as slides and record their voices reading and explaining each of the sections of the project.

Here are some finished videos: