Using GOOGLE DOCS as Teacher/Student Collaboration Tool

Most students are familiar with the WRITING PROCESS by the time they enter middle school.  Most of their experience may follow an outline similar to the one below:

By the time they reach they reach the DRAFTING phase of the process, they have hand-written a version of what their final product will look like (i.e. a speech, an essay, a narrative).  It is usually at this point the piece is turned into the teacher for review, or quite possibly even over to their peers for them to leave comments, suggestions, etc.

The Giver LEGO Sets

This past summer, I was accepted into a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) teacher workshop regarding Manifest Destiny and the Mormon Experience at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.  Part of that workshop involved taking the information learned and examining it through a pedagogical lens. To help facilitate that process, the U of U brought in local teacher expert, Quinn Rollins, to help think through ways to help students engage the content in a more meaningful way than other traditional methods (i.e. worksheets, passive note-taking, lecturing).

Quinn is also the author of the book, "Play Like a Pirate," in which he outlines practical ideas for making learning fun again.  One of the methods he shared with us at the workshop (and in the book) is for students to create LEGO sets based on information that they have read/studied.

Recently, our class read Lois Lowry's dystopian classic, "The Giver."  As a way to end the unit of study, I gave students copies of Quinn's templates and had them create a LEGO set on a key component of the story, complete with the mini-figures that would accompany their scene.  Here is a sample of what they created:

For a copy of the LEGO templates to use in your own classroom, visit here.