Erik’s Random Babble

Over the past few years, one of my third grade GT teachers has been having his students create poetry books. They worked their way through various types of poems — haiku, cinquain, etc. — and *attempted* to turn them into a book. This particular teacher didn’t really specify what software to use, or rather let the students choose between MS Word or AppleWorks. Perhaps he was overly confident of their word processing skills, or underconfident of his own, but he gave very minimal direction and mostly just left the students to their own devices when they came to the Tech Lab to type out their poems. While I’m all for open-ended-ness in lesson planning and instruction, I noticed over those years that the same mistakes kept on occurring. Students had problems formatting their poems properly. They became confused with how best to print them out. And when they did print them out, they often came with a number of blank pages following behind (as they’d failed to delete extra spaces or returns they’d inserted along the way).

At the start of this new school year, I decided to try and nip this in the bud, by suggesting an alternative to this teacher. Instead of having students simply typing up their poems whenever they came into the Tech Lab (which always struck me as requiring the bare-minimum of effort on the part of the teacher, who sadly came to just assume I would be on hand to troubleshoot all the problems that would inevitably crop up and answer all the students’ “technical” questions), I proposed the idea of turning the poetry books into an extended PowerPoint project. This would, I told the teacher, help avoid the page-formatting problems that seemed to plague previous iterations of this endeavor, while also offering numerous possibilities for extending this beyond “mere” typing. I suggested incorporating clipart and digital photos. I hinted at the possibility of recording students reading their own poems, and then embedding those recordings within the PowerPoints. And, much to my delight, the teacher even responded with a rather positive, “Maybe this will finally help *me* learn PowerPoint as well?” So, we were off.

Now, this project is still very much in its infancy, as so far the students have only created their title slide and first poem slide. I created a step-by-step instruction sheet, which walked them through the process of creating a basic, two-slide presentation, entering and then formatting the text, and, if time permitted, customizing the presentation with clipart and backgrounds. For that first lesson, I modelled the process in the front of the Tech Lab, creating my own two-slide poetry book presentation as the students read off each step that I had to do. This definitely seemed to help reinforce with the students that they needed to pay close attention to the steps on their handouts, as they created their own presentations.

When designing a rubric for this project, I knew right off the bat that the rubric would need to be something with which to evaluate the final product — not the two-slide, bare-bones presentation the students created during their first visit to the Tech Lab. So, I tried to think ahead about what sorts of things would be important in the finished product — things like text and slide formatting, mechanics like spelling and grammar, use of clipart and other media, and overall originality in creating a PowerPoint-based poetry book that was uniquely their own. Much to my delight, the rubric-generating website Rubistar (http://rubistar.4teachers.org) had just those categories at the ready, and I was able to put together the following preliminary rubric. As this project has just begun, and I haven’t yet had a chance to sit down and consult with the teacher on how students will be evaluated in the end, I consider this rubric to also be a work-in-progress. As the year goes on, and this teacher and I continue to re-examine where we want this to go, I know that it will change and expand (and in the case of the latter, I know the teacher will also want to add some rubric categories dealing with the actual content). But for now, here is what I have:

Poetry Book Rubric Version 1