As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on How to Plan a Technology Lesson, today I break down how I planned my students’ movies, We See Animals Hiding.

Unit Theme:  Look Again

State Standards: While this unit is about animal camouflage, the standard for California is more general, having to with animals and plants ability to adapt to their surroundings.  Knowing that the standard is broader than the stories in the basal reader allows you to incorporate other subject areas.  It also helps you to focus on the most important bits of your unit.

Objective: My objective was that students would be able to able to explain how and why a particular animal uses camouflage to survive.

Technology: I wrote about choosing an appropriate technology tool for the job.  Naturally teachers have a technology preference and mine is movie making.  However, I believe the tech tool (an iMac with iMovie) is appropriate because the video format allows students to combine pictures with audio.  The pictures that students choose allow me to assess whether students actually understand what they’re saying based on the appropriateness of the pictures.

Assessment: I work with the students while conducting research and writing their animal reports.  By the time students come to the computer I pretty much let them create whatever they want.  By doing this, the technology project is an authentic assessment of student learning.  If you watch the movie, you’ll hear that not all students have a firm grasp of the concept and that’s learning for me as the teacher.  However, all students working in teams of two were able to put together a couple of sentences about their animal and find appropriate pictures to add.