My students are finishing up podcasts this week. Inevitably, some groups will be finished with plenty of time to spare. We all know the importance of being prepared for such events. Two 8th graders with a class period of doing nothing is an invitation for trouble as much as it is a waste of their time.
Someone in the EdTechTalk group on Diigo bookmarked Pixton, a website used to create comic strips online. Perfect! The site is free and easy to navigate. All a user has to do is register, wait for an email invitation (arrives immediately) and they can be on their way to creating comic strips. Once the comic strip is published, code is provided for the user to embed the comic strip or share it via email with a friend.
This coming week students finishing their podcasts early will be creating comic strips dealing with weathering and erosion and then embedding the comic strip onto their blogs.
How amazing! Just before I read this I registered at Pixton!
ReplyDeleteAnother idea for "kids are finished early, now what?" is foldables. After my students have extracted information from text, activity, video, whatever, and translated it into fact fragments in some form (webs, venn diagram, thinking maps, note cards, etc.) they make a visual display with colored paper (mini-books with illustrations, captions, text; mini-project boards using colored manilla folders and construction paper,etc.)After reading and taking notes, they love the hands on cutting, folding, drawing, taping, stapling, etc. They all finish at different rates so the fast students become instructors for students who finish later. I have an entire counter in my classroom dedicated to foldable materials where students congregate and instruct each other in foldable techniques.(Something for all that constrcution paper, Anne?)These can even be used for a CSK grade. They can be turned into presentations as well as displayed in the classroom. I have been impressed by soem of the beautiful results as well as decent writing. Come to my classroom and see!
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