What's in the digital toolkit?

All this year our students in Grades 3-5 have been involved in Independent Studies.  They chose a topic they were passionate about or wanted to investigate more and have had the time to do an in-depth inquiry.  They have formulated simple questions, made them into complex questions using command words, come up with keywords and related search terms, looked for information, paraphrased and organized this information and now it is time to share their knowledge with the rest of the students.  This week we have been asking the students how they could present their findings.  We don't intend to teach the students anything new as far as presentation tools are concerned, so we wanted to find out what tools they actually felt confident in using - what they already had in their digital toolkit.  Here's what they said:

• We could make a video (using WeVideo, iMovie, Animoto, GoAnimate)
• We could make a presentation (using Google Slides, Powerpoint or Prezi)
• We could make an eBook (using Little Bird Tales or FlipSnack)
• We could make a website (using Weebly or Google Sites)
• We could make a poster (using Glogster)

We then asked them to make a choice about what they actually wanted to use.  The Wordle below shows which of these tools were the most popular:

So the students are now working independently on their presentations and we are thinking about which tool we want to use to pull them all together.  For Grade 5 we are thinking of an eBook where we can embed all the videos, posters, presentations and so on.  For Grade 4 we are thinking of making a website.  If you have suggestions for tools we can use to show all of our students' understandings, we'd love to hear from you - please leave us a comment below.

Photo Credit:  Web toolbox 2011-2012 by Aivar Ruukel, 2012