Junior High Collaboration

Here are two different types of collaboration and tools used with Junior High (grades 7-8) students.

VR Stations: Finding Context in an Era Gone By

The Diary of Anne Frank continues to hold a place in many schools' LA curriculum plans yet the time period becomes more and more distant to the students who are reading the novel. How can we bridge that gap? Mrs. Beebe reached out to me with an idea - "Can we use VR to visit a concentration camp?"

Because we had a limited number of VR goggles, we needed to find a way for students to engage without large gaps of time in between activities. We both researched available VR options, mostly within the Google Expeditions library, and came up with a set of stations where each set of goggles would be set up with the historical content needed to complete that station's activity. Students would take turns with the goggles while sharing the information with the group.

Mrs. Beebe is quite a self-starter and she led a lot of the efforts for this project. She knew what she wanted and she molded each station to accomplish the goals she had set. Here are the results of the project:

Codebreakers

Students explored a Google Expedition about the codebreakers. Based on the information in the Expedition, they were challenged to break a code of their own.

D-Day

Students took turns diving into the D-Day Expedition and sharing information needed to complete the content document. This station helped give them context about that very important day in history.

National Holocaust Museum

Despite the fact that we have a Holocaust Museum in our own nation's capital, many students will not have the chance to visit it in person. This station's document guided them through the various areas of the museum, adding to their understanding of the time and to their ability to empathize with the characters in the novel they would soon read.

WWII

What was the bigger picture? While many would argue that the Holocaust was the most horrific part of WWII, there existed more pieces to the puzzle than just the German efforts. Students were able to explore other aspects of WWII to help them gain a big picture view of the people and events leading up to and happening during WWII.

Podcast: Finding a Tool to Record and Edit

Mrs. Dunster took a slightly different collaboration path from others. She collaborated with her building's PTO who invested in recording equipment to help with the sound quality of the podcasts and with me, the district Tech Coach, to find a program that would work for recording and editing the podcasts before posting them.

In this case, we looked at a few different options and then chose to use something we already had in the district: Audacity. Tech use and collaboration are not always about creating something new and blingy. Rather, let's not reinvent the wheel. Rather, let's see if we already have a tool that students will likely use again during their time in the district.

Because she had students working in task groups for the production of the podcasts, I was able to work with the Technical Team to introduce Audacity to them, to give them time to play with it to learn it and then to answer questions they had about editing their recordings. Success!

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