This week in my pre-practicum I got to observe two 7th grade history classes in the library as they worked on their ancient Egypt "virtual library" project (in case you want to keep up as this project progresses, see the public link).
We have been reading about Media Literacy, Information Literacy, and in what is kind of a merge of the two, Information Communication Technology (ICT) Literacy in my class and there were some interesting parallels that I was able observe in practice as students worked on this project. From some of our reading on ICT Literacy, five competencies comprise ICT Literacy, including: Access, Manage, Integrate, Evaluate, and Create.
Students came to class with 4 artifacts that they had found online (Access) and got into teams of 4-5 each. Within each team, they then started to work on a classification system (Integrate and Evaluate) based on the 16-20 artifacts they had to choose from. Eventually, all the classes working on this project will need to come to some agreement on the classification system, as this will become the rooms or exhibits in their virtual museum, but it was a great first step to have everyone actively engaged in finding ways to classify their team's collection of disparate objects.
They will have to continue to evaluate the objects they come across as they narrow down which one or two they will contribute to the museum, and of course, the final part of the project will be to create their contribution (either physically or in some digital form). As the LMS said to me, her hope is that in the end, they will end learning much more about Ancient Egypt than they would have doing a more traditional project. They'll definitely learn much more than I did in the old school "read the chapter in the textbook and take a quiz" model that many of my teachers relied upon in middle school!
Today's hours: 2
Total hours: 5
