Wordles!
As I presented a slideshow with historical context about the Holocaust at the beginning of the course, students made wordles to capture their reactions to this new, shocking information. Afterward, they had a miniature gallery walk to view each other's wordles and find commonalities and differences among their reactions to what they learned about the Holocaust.
Inspiration Webs!
To organize their new understanding, on day 2 students created webs using Inspiration to show some of the ways they had learned that the Nazi party created an atmosphere of fear to gain power.
Skype!
It took a bit of a group effort and a bit of cord finagling, but we managed to connect the computer to the Smart Board for all students to have a view of the classes in Pennsylvania and Iowa we chatted with about the book. Groups of students took turns chatting with each other, asking and answering questions they had prepared about the plot, the characters, and the historical connections of Number the Stars. They were all beside themselves with excitement over talking to another class!
Letters to an educator...thanks to Twitter!
After years of pushing it away, I finally dove in with both feet to using Twitter (thanks Kyle for your encouragement and help along the way!) this year. I began following as many educators as I could find, as well as institutions like the Holocaust Museum. In fact, the original inspiration for my project altogether is all thanks to Twitter (which you can read more about on my homepage, should you so desire). Through another educator I follow on Twitter, I became connected with Marsha Goren, a teacher in Israel who is an internationally acclaimed Holocaust educator. She invited our class to share our work and our learning about the Holocaust with her so she could share it with the world as she continues to spread her message of peace through understanding of the past. Since our work was all posted to Edmodo, a secure network, most of it was not anything we could share publicly, but we wanted to thank her for all she is doing to share a message of peace to our generation. So, after watching a video she had made available (you can see it in my Thanks to... page!), which took our collective breath away, we wrote her letters explaining what we were doing as we learned about the Holocaust and thanking her for helping to teach us. We decorated our letters with butterfly clipart, as a butterfly is her symbol for remembrance and hope for the lost souls of victims.
GoAnimate and Voki!
Students created goanimate animations to re-create scenes from Number the Stars, and they created Voki avatars to represent characters in the book. They would embed their finished scenes and avatars onto our Edmodo page to share with students in our class and a class in Pennsylvania. Some students were so interested in voki and goanimate that they went home and created their own accounts with their parents!
Edmodo!
As students completed each of their daily projects, they embedded their work into an Edmodo group page that I created for the class. Through this platform, they were excited to be able to see each other's creations and share their own reflections with each other. Toward the end of our course, we had managed to get connected on Edmodo with one of our Skype-buddy classes in Pennsylvania, and my students were ecstatic to see and reply to their comments on the work we had posted.