Lesson Plan Implementation

As the school librarian at #9, I chose to work with Miss Coakley's 3rd grade class for this short research project. Here are the steps we took:

1. The students chose an animal to research.

2. The students logged onto World Book Online to read and/or listen to articles about their animals.

3. The students recorded three facts about their animals on a graphic organizer.

4. The classroom teacher provided time and supervision for the students to turn the facts into a narrative written in the first person.

 5. On my iPad,  I located and downloaded creative commons licensed images of the animals that the students chose.

6. I downloaded FaceTalker from the app store on my iPad. I then used FaceTalker to make the images of the animals "talk."

6. In Google Docs I created a bibliography of the citations for the World Book Online articles as well as the images used for the project.

7. The students practiced reading their narratives to each other. The students used my iPad one at a time to record their animal "talking." They filled out the self-assessment below after recording.

8. I saved each FaceTalk as a movie to my photos then used Book Creator on my iPad to combine the FaceTalk movies into a book, concluding with the bibliography which I copied and pasted from my Google document.

9. I exported the finished book as a movie to my Google Drive. Below is the finished product.

View book via Google Drive

Self-Reflection

• Both FaceTalker and Book Creator are easy to use. I would use them again.
• If I had more time for implementation, I would like the students to be able to select the picture and create the talking face. 
• This project took a lot of time. 
• Experimenting with new technology is good because it makes you more facile in general. I had to do a lot of playing around to save, combine, and upload the movies into the final product.
• The students benefited from the project in that they rehearsed the facts that they learned multiple times by both writing them and reciting them orally.
• The project also afforded the students the opportunity to learn how to speak slowly and carefully.
• Also, as we viewed the finished product as a class, the students learned about how to be respectful listeners to the other students' presentations.