Grade 1 students were just finishing the first draft of their stories when I entered the room. It was great to see all the students engaged; some writing, some reading, one working with the teacher on reading.
In a follow-up conversation with Sandy, I learned that the students were putting the finishing touches on their stories and the teacher was looking for a way to publish and share their work. I gave her the idea to publish an anthology to iTunes so the students and parents would be able to download their work at home. Knowing their work would be available in iTunes and be accessible by anyone would give students added motivation to push themselves further.
When we met again after the students had finished their work, we started discussing the process of publishing to iTunes. The teacher realized the students would have very little involvement in the publishing process, and had an even better idea for students to use Book Creator to make a video of their stories which they could then share to SeeSaw and YouTube.
Here is what she did:
- Students created their stories on paper
- Students then took pictures of each page of their stories and inserted them into Book Creator
- Students recorded themselves reading their stories
- The book was then exported as a video to the iPad’s camera roll
Once media is in the camera roll, it can be shared anywhere on the internet. For this project, the videos went to two places: SeeSaw and YouTube. Her reasoning for publishing in both places is that SeeSaw is her go-to space for sharing student work, but parents cannot see the work of other students there. For this particular activity, it was also good to celebrate all the books together on YouTube.
During the publishing process, I made a sample of what was to become of the stories [above] and Tweeted it out. Roxanne Levette, a grade 2 teacher in Australia saw it, and had her students comment.
Yr 2 Ss from Perth, Australia are giving feedback to Yr 1 Ss from Kaohsiung American School https://t.co/OJLEaA2P4O pic.twitter.com/qYFzbUGFSs
— Roxanne Levett (@roxanne_levett) December 6, 2015