Educreations Student Lessons

Educreations is an interactive community in which lessons can be created on an iPad or computer and shared by anyone, anywhere. I have been reading about all the different ways educators are using Educreations in their classrooms, and have been eagerly awaiting the moment that it would fit into my classroom. (I truly believe that when integrating technology into the classroom it must have a purpose based on the needs of the instruction, not because it is just a "cool" technology). Anyways, my students have just started to grasp the concept of place value and are able to answer questions about this concept. In terms of Blooms, they could understand and remember the concept of place value. Now it was time to apply place value - enter in Educreations. I decided to challenge my students to pair up with a partner and teach others about place value, thus asking them to use higher level thinking of applying their knowledge and creating something. With this being our first experience teaching others through Educreations, I first modeled for them how to use the app on the iPad, as well as provided a model for their thinking and speaking process. After one time of modeling a lesson, they were on their own to figure out how teach others. My first grade students did an outstanding job! I was so impressed to see them working together to create their own instruction. Once their lessons were created, we used the Apple TV to project each lesson on the IWB. Each lesson lasted about 1 minute and provided the opportunity for us to discuss correct and incorrect parts of each lesson. I am so excited to use this tool and explore other ways in which it will enhance the learning of my students!

Steps to Successfully Create Student Lessons

1. Identify the curriculum goal and learning objective

2. Model how to use the tool

3. Create rubric or other assessment tool for evaluation of the lesson (I will admit, I did not do this for this particular lesson, however it is something I would change and will do next time :) )

4. For team or partner lessons, guide students to assign jobs for the tasks involved. In this lesson for example, one partner was the recorder and the other was the speaker. The recorded wrote down the "script" during the discussion before teaching the lesson. The speaker used the iPad to write and speak the lesson.

Script written out for the speaker

This team consisted of 3 students. They decided to also add the third job a director. The director helped to hold the iPad and start and stop the lesson. 

5. SHARE, SHARE, SHARE!!! Students will be SO proud of their work, so show it off! Share it with the class as soon as possible, email links to parents, or post to your class website. For lessons that have errors in them (as one of mine did), discuss with the class what would need to be improved and ask students to rerecord their lesson. Talk about immediate feedback and  authentic learning!