Another Mixbook Classroom Project- Explorers
by Langwitches ~ May 15th, 2008. Filed under: Books, Classroom Projects, Storytelling.
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Fourth Graders in our school study the state of Florida and “Explorers”. Traditionally they would research and create a written book report.
THIS YEAR…
The social studies teachers assigned one explorer to a group of 3 students. They did their research in the Media Center from a wide variety of sources.
- The teacher created an account with Mixbook and shared the e-mail and password with all of his students.
- On Mixbook the teacher created a new book and added as many double pages as there are groups. One double page per explorer
- We had a brief lesson in TechConect about what copyright is. Is it OK to scan in an image you find from a book to use in your book? Almost all of the 4th graders knew that you needed the permission from the author of the book, if they wanted to use an image from a book. When I asked if it was OK to use an image that you find somewhere on the internet, it did not seem so clear to them. Over half of the students felt it was all right to just save it and then use in their report. After clearing up that misunderstanding…
- We visited Wikipedia.org and searched for their explorers. Once they found an image, they needed to verify the licensing and that it was indeed an image in the public domain. It seems important to remind them that they can not simply assume that the image is free for them to use.
- Quick demo on how to right-click and “save as” an image to the hard drive and how to use tabs in the browser to switch back to the open Mixbook project then locate and upload the saved image.
- Students added their research content and selected their own layout and background.
- Together with their classmates they produced a collection of explorer reports, learning along the way the value of collaboration and collective knowledge.
Create your own photo book in seconds! Click here!
I just happen to find an article in Edutopia, where Karen Kliegman (A media specialist who I had the pleasure of meeting in person at FETC 2008), was interviewed. She had another fantastic approach to take the traditional explorer report off the page and into the web 2.0 world.
She assigns each of her fourth-grade students an explorer to research — Columbus, Magellan, Ponce de Leon, or one of their questing contemporaries. After gathering facts, students locate images of the explorer or draw their own. They then create a vodcast, or video podcast, about the explorer’s journey using Photo Story, a free program from Microsoft that allows users to upload digital pictures and add narration and background music. Students then log on to digital-mapping programs such as Google Maps or CommunityWalk, with which they can trace their explorers’ journeys, inserting markers on the map route that link to their videos’ profiles.
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May 15th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
This looks like a great project, Silvia. I feel like this is a stupid question, but how do you check the licensing of a photo online to see if it is available for public use? Do you know of an easy way to teach the students (and me) how to do this?
thanks!
May 15th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
@Andrea
When searching on Wikipedia.org and you click on an image, scroll down and it will give you the licensing terms.
May 15th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
This is a nifty project – I like the way the Mixbook pages look. And a great way to handle copyrighted images – I struggle with that when working with younger students. Question: If the teacher created one account on Mixbook, can more than one person be logged in at a time working on the pages on different computers?
May 15th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
@Karen
Yes, I just had a 6th grade teacher in here today.Her class is working collaboratively on a mixbook of their 4-day Science study trip. She signed into her account on 16 different computers and students worked on separate pages.
May 15th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
This is Alison, and I’m from Mixbook.com – it’s so great to hear the many uses a Mixbook has in the classroom, especially in helping students to work collaboratively on a project.
In order to improve our collaboration in real time, we have actually disabled collaboration between different accounts for the time being. Logging in on different computers with the same account is still possible, but students must be aware that they cannot alter any other pages except their own.
Read updates about Mixbook on our blog at http://mixbook.wordpress.com/
May 16th, 2008 at 9:25 am
Thanks for mentioning me, Sylvia! I also used Mixbook for my ‘buddy bear’ project (see http://www.clearspring.com/widgets/476abda21237f37b?p=47ed03f3b7d7348c) that we are doing with the IV American Academy in Taiwan. Our project is @ https://buddybear.wikispaces.com/.
May 16th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
[...] 16, 2008 A great blog post was written about Mixbook on Langwitches.org – thank you to Silvia for posting yet another [...]