Day 3 – Jumping Ahead

Our goal for today was to make sure that each class had something specific to add to the whole project. While everyone is working on reviews, and the different books provide variety, each class also needs to look at how their contribution will help the site as a whole. Second grade is focusing on author studies. Third grade is taking responsibility for public relations. Fourth grade is focusing on data management (such as the book database). And fifth grade is taking responsibility for web development.

Here is a brief summary of each grades progress:

• First – Students have partners and have finished reading their books. They used the book form to find all the data about their book, including author, title, publisher, publication date, etc.
• Second – Students were introduced to Pages for the first time. We learned how to add images, text, and shapes, and to use the inspector to modify those page elements.
• Third – Each group selected one or two books from their assigned “category” to read and review. It was important to find books on a level that all members of the group could read independently. Students began to discuss the type of review they wanted to create and how they could make their video stand out and be interesting.  
• Fourth – We had new computers, which required set up (TAG log in) and moving documents from old computers to new computers. We also reviewed how the new computers were different and looked at new operating system functions.
• Fifth – Fifth grade finished their first book reviews. We discussed importing them into QuickTime format and students began to make web pages for their reviews using Pages.