Digital Story (The Stoney-Nakoda)

 Linked below is my digital story concerning the Stoney-Stoney Nakoda group of Treaty 7 Alberta. Their relationship with the Canadian government is long and harried and so there was A LOT that had to be cut out to make it to three minutes. Much of my information came from The Stoney Education Authority website where the different schools are also featured and their activities explained in greater detail.

Stoney-Nakoda Digital Story

Growing In Code

My lesson plan is mainly about plant growth and teaching students how to code. The meat of the lesson is learning about the different factors that influence plant growth, but there will also be a focus on basic coding. I used ScratchJr because the lesson geared towards grade 1 and I figured that the basic version of Scratch may be more trouble than it is worth to teach them; starting them lower will make entry into more complex coding easier. 

This is a lesson I could do for a spring science unit as plants are starting to grow again. Pairing this with outdoor learning where the students are able to actually interact with plants and perhaps even plant their own garden would provide a well rounded unit on plants.

 

ScratchJr Coding Lesson

Quoth the Raven

 BookCreator makes the process of creating novels simple. For a classroom.

In our Technologies class, Abby and I created a lesson to teach our classmates how to use the app. To do so, we created a sample novel and library and a Google Slides presentation about the parts of a novel. 

The lesson we created was geared towards a fifth grade class and was designed as the first of a whole unit on chapter books. To ease them into the lesson (and as a framing device for teaching the main features of the app), we included pictures of the different parts of different books as well as the corresponding part that we created and linked it back to the app. Our "students" were then asked to make that part of the book in their app. This was then added to our library. 

We also brought in physical books for them to find the non-story parts of a book in a bid for them to explore books in a way they normally wouldn't for themselves.

It was fun creating a lesson like this and I really liked our attempt to make it student-led with our physical novels as they got to decide what areas to explore and create. 

This is definitely a lesson I would like to recreate with a real classroom. I would perhaps have them brainstorm story ideas in a previous class so their books would have titles and the library would look less homogeneous by the end.