A snippet from the assignment write-up:
Reading is something we do all the time — so much so, that we rarely really think about how and why we read.
Your task with this benchmark is to take a close look at your reading — the personal history behind your readership, and also your skills as reader today.
Notice what you read and why those were the choices you made.
We spent about one week just on the building blocks of this project — the scenes from their history, and the annotations for their current book. Once those were complete, it was time to insert those into Prezi.
When we started the work, I did a snapshot poll of the class — and it turned out that, like me, the majority of them had not used the program before. This presented us with a classic situation in project-based learning — integrating content and skills.
At SLA, we try out many different mediums for visualization of projects, and it always takes some time to learn the ropes of a new program. If you look at your classroom strictly as a conveyer of content, this process gums up the works: students have to tinker, and discover, and teach each other, and focus on something other than the book at hand.
Luckily, we don’t believe that at SLA. Presentation is one of our five core values — so turning the raw materials into a final product that was both easy to follow and pleasing to the eye, with a mix of visuals and text.
To better aid the students, I built partial models of the project. I say “models,” because the first one just had me dragging and dropping without much of a plan. Once I had learned a few things, I developed a second one — and then showed both in class, and summarized my findings in the last slide of the “improved” Prezi:
We then spent several full class periods in “benchmark work mode,” which would include mini-lessons as needed for particular tips and tricks (“does everybody know how to rotate a frame?”) I was also available to scan pages of books students wanted to include, while others used their in-screen cameras.
The best projects were ones where students were already confident in their content, and students could develop a unified vision of how annotations grow out of the text on a page. Here are a few examples.
Roberto Abazoski – “Every Day” by David Levithan
Class Notes 