Implementation Reflection

My implementation lesson was a project on Medieval Japan. Students used Chrome books to do research on one of two topics (Samurais and Shoguns or Shintoism and Buddhism). 

We began by posting a KWL chart on Seesaw that the students responded to.  They did not know very much.

After researching for a couple of class sessions, students created a Tagul word cloud.  This was a good activity in that it gave them practice with a new application and it forced them to look at main ideas/concepts of their subject and then reduce them to about 10 vocabulary words.  Upon creating their Taguls we posted them on our class Seesaw blog.

The next step was to work in small groups with shared Google Slides.  Students used different strategies in creating their slides.  Some chose to jigsaw the activity by taking different aspects of their subject and then initially creating their own slide (e.g. swords of the samurais).  They were told that they would be responsible for all the slides, so, they would need to review each other’s slides.  This proved to be a problem with one group where they duplicated each other.

We presented our Google slide presentation to the class.  The students did fairly well.  They could have used more prep time, but we needed to move on. If I had had more time I would have students practice more and try to have them paraphrase the text from their slides.  Lacking the time to do that I had them work on reading part of the sentence to themselves and then saying it out loud to the class (this required looking at the board and then turning to speak).  It worked out well for most of the students. 

The last thing we are doing is having the students respond to the "L" part of the KWL assignment.  Although there are still gaps and misunderstandings, the class clearly learned a lot.  

Samurai 3

Samurai 2

Samurai 1

Buddhism

Shintoism