iMovie Book Trailer

Fourth graders are great at using their chromebooks, but when the carts had to be shuffled around for testing, we decided to try out an project on the ipads.  The teacher wanted his students to showcase a book they had read, and iMovie was the perfect platform to let them do that.  We choose to have them create book trailers that would summarize the book they read, and give others in the class ideas for reading over the summer.

Thanks to Learning in Hand with Tony Vincent, the students were able to plan what their book trailer ahead of time.

Once they got on the ipad it was easy to create their iMovie project.  The projects turned out great!  The students loved creating them, some even did two projects! Being able to view the trailers their friends had created was a great way to end this fun project.

STEM Fair

Orono Intermediate School hosted a STEM Fair this spring. Students in grades 3-5 were invited to participate by completing a project to showcase their inquiry skills and creative genius.  We saw everything from car engines to rockets to slime, and even the physics of bottle flipping! The STEM Fair concluded with an awesome presentation from Minnesota Physics Force.  

Nearly 200 Intermediate School students participated, and were interviewed by high school AP students.


The Intermediate students got to explain their projects and show off all their hard work to their high school peers.  This interview process provided a really neat opportunity to create community between elementary and high school students. 


Thank you to all of the elementary participants, high school interviewers, parent volunteers, teachers and staff for making this a great event for our students!

IDEA Lab

At Schumann this year we rolled out a very exciting project, we call it the IDEA Lab.  

Imagine
Design
Explore
Ask

Our original idea was to have a makerspace, but after conversations with stakeholders we decided to go a slightly different direction.  I am not quite sure what you would call it, but we have 11 different tools for student to use to explore a variety of programming, engineering, robotics and science concepts.  Our PTO graciously donated the funds for us to purchase Bee-bots, Circuit Scribes, Cubelets, K'Nex, LittleBits, MakeyMakeys, mBots, Ozobots, Puzzlets, Snap Circuits, and Spheros.  

   

Our tools are organized into boxes complete with directions and challenges. Since the students who use the tools are K-2 all of the directions and challenges are in videos.  Equipped with their ipad and qr code reader, even non-readers can independently learn how to use all the different tools. The hope is that students will practice the 4Cs (Creativity, Critical Thinking, Collaboration, and Communication) that we know to be so important to their futures in academics and professional life.  

We also hope that student have FUN while learning!