Though I spent all of Friday
thinking it must be Saturday as I clearly was not in a high school, our daytrip
to Grand Rapids for the 2014 MACUL Conference was a pleasant way to spend some
time. I made it to two sessions on Friday morning. The first was an energetic
rundown of all the infographic creation tools you could ever want while the
second gave us a look at the idea of giving your students an authentic audience
for whom to perform.
I have been developing this problem
(compulsion? ailment? talent?) whereby I walk away from everything thinking
about how I can use everything I do and see in my classroom (or in an RWT) and
MACUL was of course no exception.
 | ||
| Created on Easel.ly I think students could do better. |
As Dr. Julia VanderMolen ran
through her list
of inforgraphic websites, I was thinking about where I could incorporate them
into my lessons. With infographics, you have the ability to present statistics,
data, and information visually for those learners who might otherwise be trying
to recall information by picturing what the slide looked like or where a fact
was on the page. While this could be a wonderful way for teachers to present
some information, websites like easel.ly could be simple enough to use that the
students themselves could be the creators, something Dr. VanderMolen points out
can help your class span Bloom’s taxonomy.
Later I was stuck thinking through
how I can add a level of authenticity to my assessments thanks to the very warm
David Theune.
The authentic audience motivates students to do more than just earn the grade.
They are given the chance to perform for others—their peers, their community,
their families, maybe even the world. David has used an authentic audience to
make learning more meaningful. He tells of one project where he convinced a
community organization to donate money to his class, not for the students, but
for them to give to the nonprofit organizations about which they wrote.
So I walk away from MACUL thinking
about how I can put these elements into my classroom. I wonder if I might have
the students create infographics to show their classmates how economic
indicators are used to measure the economies of various countries. I need to
lesson plan…
