App-Tivity - 13 Original Colonies

Come and Visit the Colony of ___________.  Let me explain why we are the colony for YOU!

Above is an example of an opening line for students advertisements for the thirteen original colonies.  There were three components for the activity.

1) Research Sheet - each group of students was assigned an iPad to use and needed to use Safari or Google Apps to search out information of their colony.  They looked up: Basic information (who founded, when, type of colony, etc.), Religion, Economics, Political, Examples of Laws, Relationships with Native Americans, and Interesting Facts.  

2) Story Board - Plot and Plan the order they wanted to talk about things in their presentation and what the general concept that they wanted to say was.

3) The Presentation - Students could use iMovie (if it was on their iPad) or Voicethread to make their advertisement.  It needed to include at least six visuals, plus at least 3-5 facts from each of the categories on their information sheet.

Rubric:

35 points Information - 7 topics (up to 5 points each)

10 points Articulation

10 points Creativity - (Would people want to come to your colony after seeing your advertisement?)

10 points Visuals

TPACK and Apptivities

If you have been a teacher for more than a couple years teaching the same material, by now, you have mastered your content... Now remember back to your education classes, think back to the methods your teachers taught you on how to be an effective teacher (you probably use these without thinking about them anymore)... And last but not necessarily least (but definitely NOT what you should start with) think about modern times and the technology you use in your day to day life and then think about ways in which your students use technology.  Now if you can wrap them all together and tie them in the same package under a pretty bow that's TPACK.  It's considering your technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge and uniting them all into effective, interactive lessons.

One way to accomplish this is to do an Apptivity.  It is a break down of a large task into smaller steps that have students doing brainstorming, conducting research, collaborating with each other,  and creating a final product.  

This can teach students long term life skills that they'll need in their future careers.  Teachers, it provides more real life application of your subject.  You can also benefit in it being broken up into smaller sections that you can spread out the project so that it is not taking over your whole class period multiple days in a row, but even thirty minutes a day.  The final product will come out later in the process, but think of how good it will be, with guidance happening before each step of the process.  Also, there's more websites and postings about various activities, so you can take and change to suit your classroom without having to reinvent the wheel. It also gets the students actively engaged in a way that sometimes they will completely forget that they're learning things in the first place. How marvy is that???