The RILS process has been challenging. While writing lesson plans is nothing new, using the Educators Studio seems to organize the process and make it much more simple and less stressful. If you haven’t used Educators Studio, check out the link for them in my blog roll over there ===>>>
I wanted to point you to a couple of the lesson plans created to by my cohorts. Jesse Silver did a great job of explaining and utilizing a video editing product and Jennifer Tuttle introduces an avatar sharing idea.
Jesse advocates Stroome, a collaborative video editing platform. What is best about this lesson is two-fold: students learn to use real world technology that will only help them as they advance in their education and subsequent occupations AND it is applicable to virtually any subject and grade level, both secondary and higher education. Immediately his lesson made the wheels start spinning in my head and I was thinking of the endless ways this could be applied in and out of the classroom.
Jennifer introduces us to Voki and application in a real life scenario. She uses this to create avatars for students to speak to their “buddies” in a cooperative project with a lower grade level. This is great for shy students that may be too timid to speak publicly on their own. The added benefit here is that students have to think about what they want their avatar to say. This could be used as a built-in language lesson as well as teaching students early about the perception or message they want to create. I imagine this may be a great tool that could be used to introduce foreign language as well as international pen pals to stretch their conversation skills. As a side note, Jennifer also mentions the use of iRubric which is a fabulous additional tool for assessment.
I would highly recommend both of these lessons as they could be integrated into a number of subjects and age levels.