Gold Rush Projects: Crowd Sourced Lesson, Student-Driven Project

It started here. I wrote a project. I posted the link on twitter. TeacherTwitter made my project better.

Now I'd like to share the fruits of our labor.

It went pretty much as I expected. I grouped the students according to predisposition. Who are the natural leaders, who are the artists, who is going to need the whip cracked? I don't mean I'm boxing my kids in. I don't grab them by the shoulders and proclaim for all to hear, "Thou art the Leader! Go forth!" But we all know groups need an engine and some kids have a bigger natural engine than others. Someone needs to kickstart the group when things are dragging. They all can draw, but there are some who love to draw. They all can research, but some will be better at guiding the others to relevant information. I try to create teams that have both flexibility and strength. The chemical composition of my class makes this difficult, but I did pretty well. Which means I helped them do pretty well.

The students were allowed two small reading books about the gold rush and pioneer days, a library book about the life of miners that was too much to read in one sitting but gave good in-depth information. They had the story that we read in our reading books which started this whole thing. And they had the interwebs, based off safesearchkids.com, my preferred kid search engine.

Are the results fantastic? No. Like most student projects they range from pretty good to oh no, where do you think you found that? Sometimes in the same project. There are flashes of creativity and insight. There's also a lot of, "Wow, I didn't spend enough time helping them understand how much gold is and was worth so they just pulled numbers out of their butts." To be honest, I was more concerned with the process of mining than the hard facts of currency conversion, so I'm letting the number fudging slide. Yes, they could have looked it up. But it wasn't explicitly on my list of things to know. The process and life of stuff was more important.

Someone, I don't know who, suggested Youblisher as a way to make the booklets digital. I did that today and it worked pretty well. I didn't crop the .pdf s so there's some white space where the scanner assured me, "No no, these are 8 1/2 x 11 pages. I promise. Stop fiddling with the controls, I got this." I didn't have time to fight with the computer and this is a first time, so I'm happy.

Lauren Taylor (@LTaylorELA) suggested audioboom for a different project and I decided rather than deal with video, this time we'd make radio interviews. Easier, quicker, less editing.

Below are the links to the group results. Each group has a link to their Youblisher, which is the booklet, and the audioboom, which is the interview. Like I said, I'm happy. Some I'm downright impressed. Feedback was and continues to be on-going and next time their products will be better. This was a first for us this year. Always looking for growth.

I want to thank everyone again for their help making the project better than I conceived it to be.

Group One
Audioboom
Youblisher

Group Two
Audioboom
Youblisher (not done yet)

Group Three
Audioboom
Youblisher (not done yet)

Group Four
Audioboom
Youblisher

Group Five
Audioboom
Youblisher

Group Six
Audioboom
Youblisher

Group Seven
Audioboom
Youblisher

Group Eight
Audioboom
Youblisher