So far...

At this point in our project, students are moving along with their worldview mind maps. Students have brainstormed the things that influence their lives the most. They are choosing five of those influences to put in their mind maps. Each of the influences have to have a visual that goes along with them. As mentioned in our last meeting, one of those images needs to have Coast Salish influences.

We hit a bit of a snag with the technology.  Students are using the ipads to create their Coast Salish visuals.  We also wanted them to complete their mind maps online.  We found a website that we wanted to use, however, the website does not have the ability to save and then re visit the mind map.  We had to come up with a creative solution.  The students were to draw up a rough copy or a plan before they are allowed to go onto the computer.  This way, we could ensure that students would not lose work. We took it one step further and asked students to type up their paragraphs of their influences in GoogleDocs prior to entering them onto the mindmup website.  This caused Kelly and I to really think about the purpose of technology with this aspect of the project.  In this case, doing the mind maps on the computer (ipad/online) seems to be adding additional steps we did not anticipate, causing the project to be drawn out.  If we were to do this part again, I feel we would need to find a better program to use that would be able to share with google drive.  We didn't want a program that the students would have to create accounts with, just something free and easy.  We are open to suggestions if you have them!! The main issue we seem to be running into is the time it is taking for students to complete the assignment.  We are trying to keep in mind the principal of learning that learning takes patience and time, but with a school timetable, it's hard to do!



Moving forward, the goal is to have students done their mind maps before we part for Winter Break.  The positive outcome of this has been the students experimenting with the apps and asking for new and different apps for us to download.  The students are excited to get to use the technology, which is great, however, with only five ipads, we cannot have all students working on ipads at once.  Another positive is that our students are creating beautiful art.

Our next step is to further develop the Origin Stories unit which will begin in the new year.