Success!

Well, we're back at school, and back into the swing of things. My hopes of getting my students signed up for g-mail and my wikispace took more time than I had anticipated, but we finally got everyone taken care of. The first 'Authentic Learning" assignment of the year was Elemental Survivor. I'm pretty pleased with the way it turned out. The kids enjoyed blogging, and interacting with each other on the blog. They honed their researching skills, although they used Wikipedia as a source more than I would have liked, despite my direction to verify the information with other sites. I set up a blog for each of my classes and had each class research the same twelve elements. I realized, after the fact, that it would have been better to set up one blog, and have each class research different elements. The interaction between the classes would have added another dimension to the project, and they could have covered most of the elements on the periodic table.
My next big project will utilize and MP4 format. We'll be researching the development of the atomic model, sharing our findings on the wikispace, and creating podcasts. Stay tuned....