Embracing Digital Education in 5th Grade

On our 18th Week of Online Learning and a week before Christmas break, our 5th Graders continue to show commitment and resilience as we wrap up the first term of this school year.  

Exploring Digital Media in Education

Our last UOI for this term is under the transdisciplinary theme of How We Express Ourselves: Digital Media. It is a timely and relevant topic for this season of online learning as we explore the different types of digital media, how digital media functions as a means of expressing oneself, and the rights and responsibilities that we have related to digital media.

We used various digital platforms to go deeper in our inquiry, such as Brainpop and Youtube Videos, blog articles, and Epic E-books. Our students researched the different types of digital media such as social media, film/videos, music/audio, games and graphics/pictures.

They contributed to building their own knowledge base and awareness of our digital rights and responsibilities through watching videos, reading articles, and small group discussions during our fiction and nonfiction read alouds.

See Also: Elementary Extra: Fostering Sustainability Awareness in Second and Third Graders

Crafting Fifth Grade Digital Portfolios in Google Sites

We are also very excited to be working on our summative assessment which is our Fifth Grade Digital Portfolio in Google Sites. Our students are presently creating new content for their portfolios as well as curating and uploading their past unit projects. They will be populating their websites with video projects, picture slides, written work, reflections and blurbs, not just from our core subjects, but also from their specialist classes.

Integrated Language Arts

For Integrated Language Arts, the 5th Graders completed an “About Me” page for their websites. They are also currently working on writing a 5-paragraph persuasive essay stating their opinion about the best form of digital media to express oneself. They first started with their outline detailing three main ideas/reasons to support their choice, and are now working on their rough drafts.

Math Adventures in Digital Learning

Some of the Math concepts that we are learning and reviewing are data landmarks, solving word problems and open number sentences, estimation and computation, and magnitude estimates. For the past month, one of the highlights in our Math class has been to learn different strategies or algorithms to solve for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division equations. We will integrate this with our UOI by having the students choose an algorithm that they can teach to others by creating a teaching video of this method, which will then be uploaded to their Google Sites.

Our students have truly stretched themselves this year and have proven that they can be inquiring, open-minded and risk-taking learners. They have done great this term and we should be proud of their hard work!

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