Poetry, Googling and Tech Integration

This year on our campus, we are fortunate to have Technology in our specials rotation.  For the past several years our district has pushed integrating technology into the classroom.  This is a difficult task.  Teachers want to use the technology, but then when a lesson is complicated with the simple task of using the technology and hinders the integration it becomes very frustrating.  So now we have the best of both worlds!  Technology skills in the specials rotation while teachers integrate technology for  21st Century Learning.

Recently, I decided to try out how the technology skills were coming along.  In a short 45 minute lesson my 5th graders were able to accomplish quite a bit.  The teacher wanted me to go over poetry formats and I needed to get a searching skills lesson in.  Using a keynote presentation, we first looked at some poetry formats and created a bubble map comparing two formats.  I then gave them the task of using Google to find poems with the same format and explain how they could tell.  The had to use search terms to narrow their hits, take screen shots of the poems they found, drag the picture into a Word document and add a text box explaining their thinking.  Then they had to save their evidence into a student drive on our Network.  They had success and the discussions about poetry and searching terms were amazing.  Here is some of their work.  Although not "pretty", the work evidence is there.