For our first project, we assigned students to research a state that they find interesting and create a brief presentation on that state. Below you will see the rubric handed out to students for this project.Technology used: Apple iPad2 using iOS 4.3.5Apps used: Keynote, Safari, if time allowed: Stack the States and World Atlas
Time Allotted for Project: 4 days total,
- 1 day to introduce the iPad, 1 day for research, 1 day for continued work, and the last day to submit the project.
Websites Used: This project was done entirely using wikipedia
The Rubric from the teacher:
State iPad/Keynote Project
Objective: The purpose of this project is to understand and discover more about Keynote using the iPad. Keynote is an effective way to present information to a group of people. Throughout this year each student will be accountable for putting together presentations in each of their classes. The hope is that you will be able to navigate your way through Keynote using the iPad so that you will be able to put together presentations that are clear, organized, and appealing to your audience.
We are each going to choose a state that we are interested in as a focus for this project. It can be a state you want to learn more about or one that you have visited and are familiar with. Each slide will have information that will tell more about this state throughout the keynote presentation. Below will be an outline with the required slides with the required information. Also, the information needs to be cut down to just bullet points with the most important information appearing on each slide (no complete sentences allowed).
Slide One: Intro.
What is needed: Picture and name of state, heading info., transition
Slide Two: States basic information
What is needed: Capital, areas rank, population, nickname, picture of state flag, year state was admitted to the union, transition
Slide Three: Attractions
What is needed: List what state is known for, list three tourist attractions, picture of a top vacation spot in the state, transition
Slide Four: Sports
What is needed: List of major college teams or professional teams, picture of most popular team in the state, transition
Slide Five: Fun Facts
What is needed: Info you find interesting or unique, picture of your choice, transition
Slide Six: Bibliography
What is needed: Information on where you found the data, cited correctly
Based on feedback from the students and the teacher of our History 8 class, all were very happy with how the first project went.”Students have shown already that they know information on the states that they researched…and how to better present and communicate the information to an audience.” Being able to have the technology come to the classroom proved to be very helpful in keeping students focused on the project. The teacher also shared that not worrying about logging into their individual accounts was very helpful.
A couple of closing notes. We setup the teachers email account to filter email messages based on subject lines. We have it filtering “History 8 Per 1″ to a folder specific for students of that period, all the way through Per 4. By having the students save their projects as flastname History 8 Per # the teacher now can quickly look at which projects have been turned in or not. We also setup all of the email accounts using iPhone configuration utility, so that the students can send email from the iPads, but do not have access to receiving emails on the general mail account. Lastly, I setup an additional ipad to view all messages that are sent from the iPad to help record if someone typed in an email address incorrectly. This was kind of an issue. I would say about 1-2 students per class misspelled the last part of the email address or their teacher’s last name, even though it was spelled out on the board in the front of the classroom. I will be correcting this issue by syncing an address book to the iPads, that have all of the teacher email addresses in it. Then they will just type the name and it will auto-complete. We were able to quickly see any emails that did not go through, with the help of the additional iPad that had the full account on it, and then from there forward the project to the teacher of record.
