Gentlemen, Start your Engines!

Well here we are at the end of our first week of school. Our most excellent MPX 9 team (John, Bob, Chris and myself) had decided back in July to start the year with a small scale project that would have the students look at societal conflict through a role playing simulation. It would give them a chance to experience a mini form of a project, lets us scaffold some of the baseline agreements we need (group norms, reflective blogging, storytelling, etc) and have a product in time for Back to school night on August 24 for our parents.

MPX 9 Teaching Team ready to go on Day1!

After some opening activities with students getting to know each other and us, we jumped into a group problem solving activity to have them work together and start thinking of what effective groups have in common. The students set up their blogs and other tools like Showbie to allow us to have a class workflow.

Students working on the collaborative puzzle activity

Students working on the collaborative puzzle activity

Students working on the collaborative puzzle activity

By the second day of class they were into the societal conflict simulation and were also developing norms for group work and reflective blogs. Chris Falk and I ran class together and it was a lot of fun having all 42 students in class together!

Students co-constructing group norms

Students co-constructing group norms

42 students together for conflict simulation – mayhem!

Students portray a tableau from their conflict

Students portray a tableau from their conflict

Since we wanted students to work with video for the project, we had them do a STEM challenge of building a bridge with popsicle sticks so they could capture video and images to create a short movie.

Students build and record popsicle stick bridges

Students build and record popsicle stick bridges

Lance Iwamoto shares how to create strong video stories

They made a quick video trailer

to practice creating video. Our excellent video storytelling teacher, Lance Iwamoto dropped in to give the kids some of the secrets of create quality video stories. He included showing some of his students’ award winning Hiki No videos like this

109 Shawn Kalei Kahookele from GWN Storytelling on Vimeo.

The Students finished the week planning a bit for their videos they will be making next week and reflecting on their learning from the week.

We are off to the races! We are excited about the great work the students will do this year.

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