Serena Visits Channel

One of the things I'm most proud of in my Second Life is making friends with other educators. We meet, get to know each other, and sometimes, when I'm lucky, find ways to collaborate in real life. This is Serena, who is really Mary in Maine visiting me at my house on Channel Island. She teaches third grade and I teach five third grade classes. Sometime this fall we scanned our curricula for similarities and found Animal Adaptations. I worked with my library media specialist and five classroom teachers on a plan to use Web 2.0 tools to share what we know about animal adaptations. The LMS and I are a team. She often does the research with the students in support of the project we are completing in the lab. In this case she created a graphic organizer and helped the students get information about animals. We grouped the third graders into fifteen teams. Each team had an adaptation to find an animal for: long beak, sharp teeth, scales, etc. They came to the lab with this information and wrote what they would say about the animal. They they all drew a picture of their animal in Pixie. One was chosen from each group for the slideshow. Three of the third grade teachers were able to be in the computer lab to help when their students were working. Some of them did some additional work with the students in the classroom without me. I created a Voice Thread with my students and Serena's class listened and responded. Hopefully we will find more to do together in the future. I can tell you that knowing Serena was going to look at our work helped us step it up a notch! It doesn't affect only the students who put their work on the web. The teachers involved want to do their best, too. This was a fun project. The Voice Thread is at http://voicethread.com/share/350978/.