Are you still posting student work only in the hallway?
Many well recognized voices in the field of education emphasize the importance of showcasing student work, including Marzano and his famous Nine Instructional Strategies for Effective Teaching and Learning
(#3 Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition). Why showcase student work? Positive reinforcement is a powerful motivator, and students tend to produce higher quality work when they know other people will see it (including their parents). Teachers have been showcasing student work in a variety of ways for a long time, from posting work in the hallways to more recently using student-created websites, blogs, and ePortfolios. Not every option for showcasing student work needs to be digital, but if we neglect to include those options, we don't prepare students for the increasingly digital world they'll inherit after graduation. The option and method below involves using four apps and/or services, iMovie, Dropbox, School World Teacher Sites, and Dropitto.me, and results in an online showcase of student-created videos.
Mary McCatherine of Lampasas Middle School worked with her 7th Grade Reading class to create and post links to videos based on their I Am Poems (see them here). Students wrote their I Am Poems and then used the iMovie App to create a video that associated images and music with each line of their poem. Once the videos were created in iMovie, students exported them to the iPad's camera roll. Once in the cmaera roll, students went to Mrs. McCatherine's Dropitto.me site using the iPad's regular web browsing app (Safari) and were able to browse to their videos and upload them straight into her Dropbox account.
Dropitto.me is a particularly effective service for working with videos created on iPads: multiple students can be independently and simultaneously uploading videos into the teacher's Dropbox account...all students have to do is go to the web address the teacher provides (www.dropitto.me/user), enter an upload password, and browse to their video in the camera roll.
(#3 Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition). Why showcase student work? Positive reinforcement is a powerful motivator, and students tend to produce higher quality work when they know other people will see it (including their parents). Teachers have been showcasing student work in a variety of ways for a long time, from posting work in the hallways to more recently using student-created websites, blogs, and ePortfolios. Not every option for showcasing student work needs to be digital, but if we neglect to include those options, we don't prepare students for the increasingly digital world they'll inherit after graduation. The option and method below involves using four apps and/or services, iMovie, Dropbox, School World Teacher Sites, and Dropitto.me, and results in an online showcase of student-created videos.
Mary McCatherine of Lampasas Middle School worked with her 7th Grade Reading class to create and post links to videos based on their I Am Poems (see them here). Students wrote their I Am Poems and then used the iMovie App to create a video that associated images and music with each line of their poem. Once the videos were created in iMovie, students exported them to the iPad's camera roll. Once in the cmaera roll, students went to Mrs. McCatherine's Dropitto.me site using the iPad's regular web browsing app (Safari) and were able to browse to their videos and upload them straight into her Dropbox account.
Dropitto.me is a particularly effective service for working with videos created on iPads: multiple students can be independently and simultaneously uploading videos into the teacher's Dropbox account...all students have to do is go to the web address the teacher provides (www.dropitto.me/user), enter an upload password, and browse to their video in the camera roll.
Once the videos were uploaded into Mrs. McCatherine's Dropbox account, grabbing links to those videos and sharing them via her School World Teacher site was easy. Now, students and their parents can view the I Am Poem videos students created from anywhere at any time!
Ready to give it a try?
Don't hesitate to contact me or Lori if you need some help!!