Our great task project came from the IO site, and was for the grade 12 social studies curriculum. From the IO site the task was described as:
Imagine yourself somewhere wonderful: screaming down the biggest roller coaster in the world; surfing; singing backup in a band; routing through Egypt. Or perhaps you find yourself traveling back in time to the trenches of World War I or participating in a peaceful assembly along side Ghandi. Putting yourself into the picture enables students to connect with and become enchanted with times and places that they will surely want to learn more about.
Great Task Product:
Great Task Rubric:
The rubric for this task was based on a 1 to 4 scale, and was graded on the following components: research, photo display, content narrative and content organization. The full description of the rubric can be found on the IO website.
Great Task Reflection and Grade:
If I was a teacher marking our project I would give our finished project a 3.5 out of 4 on all the components of the project at the grade 12 level. I think our photoshopping and the layout of the project was well done. The writing and the references were fun to do.
What worked well?
1. Project idea is good and fun. Presumably, students would enjoy finding iconic images to photoshop, and would enjoy "putting themselves in the picture".
2. Photoshopping your own image into the picture forces the student to focus his / her writing as if they were really there: keeps perspective very well.
3. Highlights the difficulty in point of view: by putting oneself in the picture, the student not only must write from that point of view, but also must constantly consider how that individual thought. This leads to a lot more research, and work - which is great!
4. The project length was solid. It would take students easily a full week to complete this project. The writing component would be quite challenging for students.
What worked poorly?
1. Some images are great iconic images (for example the tank man in Tiannanmen Square), but are not so good to photoshop (since it's hard to tell what is photoshopped). So, we had to search for images related to the iconic image rather than the particular image we were interested in obtaining.
2. Researching both sides of an issue can be very difficult, because of the paucity of research on the "non-western" view. It's hard to access, for example, the Communist State's perspective on a particular issue. It would be great if the students could access some of the official propaganda for a particular state, but those references are hard to find.
What would we do differently next time?
1. It would be great to have a cohesion to all the projects in the class. Perhaps the works could be bound into one newspaper or one documentary.
2. I would redesign the rubric a bit to allow for more creativity in the project, and to reinforce the idea that we want students to write as if they were that person. One way to do that would be to ask students to provide a character sketch of the individual to get them to really think about what it would have been like to be in that particular place at that time.
3. I would link each image of the newspaper to an Aurasma newsource. Or the project could be expanded to allow for an Aurasma presentation on the subject by students.
How well did the group work together?
1. It was a joy to work with Emily and Jackie on this project, because we were all so flexible and not too uptight about how each of us were going to do our parts of the project. After our initial meeting, we divided up tasks and then met regularly to ensure the project was moving forward, and to solicit feedback. It's great to work in groups, and everyone had lots of ideas.
2. It was good feedback from Greg Long about including a reflection on how we worked together. I think it's a very good idea to include rating your group, and some feedback in the rubric. I have done this in the past, and it's usually useful. Suprisingly, I have found that students have self-evaluated very well on this part of the rubric (how well did i work with others, etc) and it's a good way to sit down and talk to individual students about how to work well in a group.
