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Two Peas in a Pod

iPods in Education Grant 

2 Peas

Two Peas in a Pod

Summary

Students and iPods go together like two peas in a pod - inseparable. Students can frontload weekly vocabulary, video, and content making new associations by watching and listening to video and other class materials - at their convenience and as many times as they need.
 

Need / Purpose/Goals

It is important that students are interested in learning and even learning on their own.  Since the iPods have media content on them and are a technology they love, students will enjoy learning new content and spark investigation as they learn the vocabulary and prepare for more in depth and meaningful learning in class.
 

The population served will be all students in a teacher's classroom of thirty.  Struggling students from ESL or Special Education will benefit a great deal since they can listen and watch over and over without any alienation.  General population students will benefit from the inspiration to prepare for class and review material, and they can advance to more in-depth material and download it to their iPod for review and sharing with class.

 

Our goals will be to enable students to pre-learn or frontload with videos from United Streaming, and PowerPoints with voice explanations/lectures, which will be measured with short quizzes they will take on the iPod that the teacher will be able to download and keep in a portfolio.
 

Example assignments:  Find key points from the video, find more related materials using the internet or do lesson activities in United Streaming that go with the videos, voice narrate the PowerPoints, and answer the quiz, review notes from the board saved to the iPod, preview and review class materials.

 

As students preview material they can also record their voice or others for interviews, etc. to gather information and research and produce media of their own as they are assigned.  Assigned recordings can be downloaded by the teacher and added to the student portfolio.

 

Example assignments for recordings:  Reading practice, vocabulary or spelling recite, interviews, field results, data collection, voice memos or summaries from videos previewed.

Currently few students learn on their own, research or even do their homework.   Some of the reasons are that we expect them to do their homework in a paper and pencil fashion and today is the media age, so student would like to do their learning in the media fashion.

 

Rationale

This will help us fulfill our campus and district plans by implementing the use of more technology and increasing reading fluency, vocabulary, and depth of understanding.  By addressing student learning with media, they will advance further and be more willing to learn and practice more on their own, taking ownership of their learning experience.

 

Objectives

Students will be able to do more in-depth learning in class.

Student will begin to build on prior knowledge.

Students will be able to hear and see the videos and class materials as many times as needed.

 
Students could have quizzes on the iPods over the video materials or show notes, increase in class participation, better knowledge of vocabulary, extended class learning experiences, interest, and recorded portfolio of readings or data collection, are all ways we will be able to measure the growth of the students.

 

Procedures

Students will pick up the iPod after school preloaded with videos, PowerPoints, etc of the next weeks topics for class.  They may have homework assignments such as record reading, record data found in the field or interviews.  Weekly in the morning students are to return the iPod to the teacher before school.  The teacher will re-load the iPod with new materials for the next week and collect the recordings into a student folder.

 
Teachers sync information collected from all resources for the following weeks topic. Students have the week to review before the week they use the information in class, then the next weeks is loaded, so they will have two weeks worth of content on the iPod - one for review and one for preview.
 
During the week and weekend after school hours - students review the material on the iPod and collect portfolio recordings. 

 
Project Evaluation
Comparisons of the class scores in comparison to those of a class without the iPods.
 
Students with the use of iPods should be more motivated learners than their peers and more apt to learn on their own. 
 
Students will have more technology experience than their peers.
 

Click here to complete the application for "Two Peas in a Pod"