Digital Edge Project

I found this resource to be very entertaining and I can see that it will be very helpful in my future teaching career. The Digital Edge Project provides archives of lessons, both written and in video form, that teachers have done. It gives the background setting of the class, teacher, and what the lessons are about, explains the lesson and assessment, and how it all went.
I wanted to share about two lessons. First, I reviewed one titled "Energy Explorations" which was designed and done with a 3rd grade classroom of boys and girls in Florida. It was taught by a teacher named Mrs. Dutton. She incorporates technology into the lesson a few times, creatively.
First, she gets the students interested in energy by encouraging the idea that energy is everywhere around them all of the time. She inflates a solar balloon to get the students asking questions and starts the inquiry process. I like that she chose to do an inquiry-based lesson to let the students carry out their own investigations. They studied energy in the form of heat, light, sound energy, and electricity by leading experiments. They collected data and recorded it in groups into their "Science Journals." Each group then got to use the program, HyperStudio4 to show their scientific findings on a visual slide. They had to use a picture somewhere on the page as well.
This program was probably new to many of the students, but keeping the requirements simple and open-ended allowed for everyone to participate. Finally, each group was able to "teach" their findings to the rest of the class, giving a small presentation with their visual they created. I feel like this was a very effective idea. Creating a summary of their findings forced the students to synthesize all of the evidence they collected about energy. Many times with science labs, we follow the procedure, record our data, and find a solution to our question, all without really thinking abou the meaning of the question or problem. So, in other words, rather than learning unconnected facts about energy, the students are left with several "take home" big ideas that they can remember and back up with their experiences and experiments.
My favorite part about this lesson is that it included real scanned versions of what the students had made. The website included copies of journal pages and lots of pages created using HyperStudio4.

The second lesson that I found and wanted to mention was "Why tell a digital story?"
This short video really showed how important story telling is and how easily it can be lost. Many cultures relied on storytelling as a tradition to have history "recorded" and remembered. Now, we have books, and writing to tell these stories, but creating a digital story is much more. I've personally made several digital stories using pictures, and words. It encourages creativity and they can be made about anything and used for almost any agegroup - over 3rd grade maybe. Whether the story is non-fiction or fiction, this lesson can teach students that they can be creative with writing all of the time.