With finals week upon us, there is an increased emphasis on test preparation and the desire to have students retain as much information as possible. In Mrs. Herold's SDC Biology class at Etiwanda High School, students took a different approach. Their task was to prepare a presentation about a genetic disorder that was assigned to them; this is nothing new in a biology class. What is new, however, is how the students would embrace the content. For the first day of the project, Mrs. Herold and her students learned about a website called Flippity.net that takes content from a spreadsheet and turns it into dynamic flash cards. The cards can be different colors, have customized text, include images, and even include YouTube videos! As a study resource, this is a phenomenal way to get students more interested in compiling information. Mrs. Herold's students had bigger goals - take the information you have gleaned about your project, put it into the flash cards, then create a Google Slide presentation about the disorder. BOOM! On the second day, students continued to work with their flash cards with the goal of building something they could use on their projects. As they grew more comfortable with the platform, the questions became more complex and the interactions with the spreadsheet became more involved. We saw the designs begin as a basic creation and transform into something quite impressive! For the third day of the activity, Mrs. Nemecek, Etiwanda's teacher-librarian, came in to speak with the students about GALE. GALE is a robust database that provides quality sources of information for their research as a part of their research for the genetic disorders that were assigned to them. Another quality feature is the ability to highlight text and annotate text digitally, have it read back to the user, and also save the text to Google Drive. Mrs. Nemecek did a great job of walking students through the process and set them up with a helpful tool. We have no doubt that these students are benefitting from the use of technology, but it's more than that. Mrs. Herold, Mrs. Nemecek, and the entire team at Etiwanda High School are building a culture of risk-taking that directly benefits the students. We are honored to have been a part of this.
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AuthorsDemi, John Stevens, John Corrow, and Paula are excited to visit classrooms and meet with teachers to see some of the awesome things that are going on within CJUHSD. Archives
February 2016
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