I have had SO much fun working with Mr. Vanlandingham’s 2nd grade class at Mehfoud Elementary. Mehfoud is a MindUp school which means students “learn to self-regulate behavior and mindfully engage in focused concentration required for academic success.”
Mr. Van’s class has been researching the different parts of the brain and their functions. They wanted to create a collaborative movie to bring awareness to others in their school and community about the responsibilities of the different parts of the brain. I love this project SO much because it was truly an authentic, student led experience from start to finish!
Students worked in small groups to create informative movies about a part of the brain they wanted to explore. Students used the augmented reality app, Augmenter, to explore parts of the brain. This app is AMAZING. The free version comes with 13 different models while the paid version has over 300 models. To complete this project we only needed the free version since the brain was one of the 13! Students scanned the AR trigger image and a brain popped up. We had a blast dissecting the different parts of the brain and taking pictures of each other holding the hippocampus, dendrites, amygdala, etc.
These pictures were used in their iPad videos. Each group was given free range to chose an app that would best help them with their video creation. Some of the apps we used were Chatterkid, YakIt Kids, and Stage.
After the different movie segments were created, we held a competition! Mr. Vandlandingham had his students open a blank Pixie file and design what they thought would make an excellent cover for their class movie. Students had to come up with a creative title that would represent the main idea/purpose of their movie as well as make the slide visually appealing. We had them save their creation as a jpeg and upload their image to {THIS} Dotstorming board. Dotstorming allowed the students to vote on their favorite image. Hence, THE BRAIN EXPERIENCE was born:
The last step to this project was working as a class to compile the images and video clips to make one big movie using Movie Maker. This movie will be shown on morning announcements and tweeted out to Goldie Hawn, the founder of Mind Up!
Enjoy:
The Brain Experience from Julie on Vimeo.
