Final Blog

My lesson was designed to promote community and friendship in my classroom. I applied my lesson to the communication arts grade level expectation:
2. Develop and apply effective skills and strategies to analyze and evaluate oral and visual
media
A. Media Messages
5th grade: Analyze messages conveyed in various media (e.g., videos, pictures, web-
sites, artwork, plays and/or news programs)

The main aspect of the lesson was to read a book about friendship and talk about the various aspects of friendship. Then the students brainstormed examples and talked about examples from the book. We also watched “hipposodes” on the Owen and Mzee website which were student created paper character cartoons. These cartoons showed several acts of friendship between Owen and Mzee and were great brainstorming times for the students to come up with their own scenarios.
After reading the book and watching the student created cartoons, the students were excited to talk about ways they could apply friendship in the classroom. To extend the lesson further, in the following weeks, we kept updated on Owen and Mzee’s progress through the Park’s blog. The blog allowed the students to stay connected and added in another piece of technology. Although this lesson did not allow the students to use the technology when it was convenient for them and to enhance their own personal learning, it was still beneficial. Due to the constraints of technology in my classroom, achieving the transforming uses portion of Grappling’s technology Spectrum was not possible. However, the students were still able to learn and complete an activity that could only be accomplished through technology, but was not for the sake of technology.