Fourth graders Grace Garcia (left) and Molly Simon (right) love the technology tools—such as Glogster.com—that they get to use in class. Their teacher, Amy Jahna (center), says computer and online skills are essential to student learning.
Amy Jahna’s fourth graders have been researching Florida’s breathtaking landforms—you know, barrier islands, keys, capes, marshes, estuaries, canals.
Oh, and also: sinkholes.
Using Glogster.com, these students at All Saints Academy in Winter Haven, Florida, recently compiled their research into virtual posters and presented their findings to the class.
Molly Simon studied Florida’s springs, her interactive poster displaying animated flowers, facts about the state’s water supply, and pictures of a manatee and a diver gliding through deep blue water.
Grace Garcia’s Glog featured, among other things, five pictures of massive holes in the Earth.
These two projects may have been on opposite ends of the serenity spectrum, but the girls are on the same page when it comes to their enthusiasm about the technology they used to demonstrate their knowledge.
“I love Glogster,” Grace says. “Because it’s almost like a poster but it’s online and you can just create your own things, and it’s awesome.”
Molly says she likes that the program allows her to do more than she could with conventional poster-making materials.
“I love how you can change all the fonts and the colors and how you can make things that are animated,” she says. “You don’t just have one color—a gray pencil—and you can make things move and have videos.”
Mrs. Jahna says she uses this and other tech tools in her classroom because being comfortable with them is critical to her students’ success.
“I think it’s so important that they know how to use a computer through and through,” Mrs. Jahna says. And creating Glogs helps them develop such skills as conducting online searches, uploading pictures, embedding links, recording and uploading videos (which they did to add narration to their posters), and leaving comments on classmates’ Glogs.
She integrates other tech resources, as well—including a Promethean interactive whiteboard, iPads, and the online curriculum provided by Code.org, an organization dedicated to increasing interest in computer science.
And the students clearly prefer technology to more conventional learning materials. “When we are doing our projects, I say, ‘There are books over there that we can use,’” Mrs. Jahna says. But they often reply, “’Everything’s online, Mrs. Jahna. We don’t need books.’”
She says that during the Code.org lessons, three students in particular were so engaged, “they flew through all 20 levels! It just blew my mind.” One student’s parent even purchased coding software for him so that he could continue working on it at home.
Mrs. Jahna says she will continue to experiment with and incorporate technology as much as she can. She says she appreciates how the VARtek operations team helps her explore the possibilities—even when she asked them to configure web browsers on several computers to give her access to a site to which she had only a 30-day trial.
“They are constantly supporting us in any way they can,” she says.