When I was teaching 6th grade science in 2011-2012, I wanted to cultivate an environment which called my learners to become true scientists and document and share data (report your findings!) every day.  In addition, I wanted to bridge the school to home gap that sometimes emerges in an Inquiry-based classroom and increase parent engagement.  Let’s face it, as educators, we all have enough on our plates.  So, how could I accomplish both of these goals without creating a ton of additional work for myself?  I found the answer in student ownership and pairing technologies!

The technology tools that I had on hand every day were my personal iPod, 2 digital cameras and 4 Flip cams that I bought on sale, and my personal Macbook Pro.  Mainly, we used the iPod and Macbook for the topic that I’ll be discussing in this post.

After getting permission from administration and sending a letter home requesting parent permission to share photos and video of students, we compiled a no-photo list and displayed it near the door in our classroom.  The deal was that we (as a classroom) would never post a name and a face together and that we would never picture the face of somebody who was on the no-photo list…hands were ok!

Every day, different students were assigned the task of documenting our learning.  We typically rotated around the members of one lab group per week.  Everyone at some point had the opportunity to be our documentarian/field scientist. Students took pictures, video, and interviews during our class period.  At the end of the week, a new group of students were selected to create a video that reflected our learning. We viewed the video on the following Monday to connect student learning to the next week and posted it to our website as a sharing/reflection piece.  The awesome part about this was that it provided a connection from each of my class periods as well.  For the first time, they got to see how their peers tackled science content in another class period.  In addition, parents were engaged and could see what we were doing in our classroom every day/week.  They were physically able to peek into our classroom through our sharing on our class website.  We used Animoto and iMovie frequently to create our weekly sharing artifact.  I only taught the first two students how to use iMovie and Animoto, which meant that there was student ownership in this whole process.  Once I had my iMovie and Animoto pros, they had to teach the next set of students how to use the tools.  After the first few weeks, this was a pretty seamless process.

How did we keep up to pace on sharing daily?  When seeking a technology to use, I wanted something that could be embedded on our class website so that it was navigable and I wanted it to be simple enough for the students to use and for me to manage.  In the end, I chose to use a private Instagram account and feed it to Tumblr so that I could make it appear as a photostream, attached to my website.  At that time, Instagram hadn’t gained mass popularity yet and there was no widget to add the stream to my site which is why I utilized Tumblr for curating the photos.  As a class, we set very clear guidelines about posting images.  We agreed to meet these expectations:

• You have to caption images with the date and text to describe the learning
• Only Ms. Marcotte could be the person to share  the image as the final step
• No faces of no-photo students
• No names/faces together in an image

So, how did I manage this in a classroom with 30+ students at times?  As students documented our learning, if they wanted to share a picture from the day, they had to open Instagram and date and caption the picture. When ready, they had to get my permission and I was the only one allowed to push the final share button. This resulted in our daily photostream.  Check it out here!  There was a lot of positive feedback because by the time the students got in the car at the end of the day, the parents already knew what questions to ask and topics to talk about because they had viewed the uploaded photos. The students loved it and took ownership of it and their learning.  They wanted to talk about science when they went home!  At the end of the year, we had a reflection for almost every day of their 6th grade year in science.  That was powerful!

Q & A’s I have gotten about using these tools in the classroom:

1. How did you present this idea to students?  I presented the idea by telling them that science is all about sharing. What would happen if all of the great scientists in the world never shared their understanding? What would we know and what would the world be like today? I told them that the iPod would rotate around lab group members each week (1 person each day). It was their job to document our learning and to share it. We agreed on the expectations for images captured and shared.
2. What specifics did you address with parents?  I didn’t do anything specifically related to Instagram since I created a private feed and Instagram. I created a photo/video permission slip (with administrative approval) and told parents a student’s name would never be associated with their face. We had our list posted on the wall of the classroom that said who couldn’t be photographed/filmed. It was the responsibility of the documentarian to not include their face in photos/videos. It was the job of the editor to double check this for all class periods as a step in the editing process.
3. Were you concerned about using social media with your students?  I taught science.  There were concerns every day about everything!  Hot plates + sixth graders…need I say more?  I discussed my idea with administrators and I got it approved beforehand since I was utilizing social media in the classroom.  Having a private feed and never picturing names and faces together made our classroom a safe place for documenting our learning.  Through the proper structure and roll out of the idea with students, the “scariness” of using social media lessened.  So much of the success of utilizing social media was really about our classroom culture and strengthening it through clear expectations and trust.
4. Seriously, how much work did this take for you to accomplish this?  Seriously, it was all student created and managed.  Literally, all I did was push the share button on my iPod after reviewing the photos and then uploaded the weekly videos to Google Drive for sharing.  Just like lessening the fear of using social media, with proper structure, we were able to create a flow of roles in our classroom that allowed me to be a facilitator of the documentation and not have it be dependent on me solely.  And…it’s a classroom!  If it took extra time for editing on the following Monday, we were flexible and gave it the time it needed.  Some weeks, we didn’t watch the review videos until Tuesday or in rare cases Wednesday if there were a lot of student interviews that week.