Two big library goals for this year are to give students time to dream, tinker, create, and share as well as collaborate globally.  Our fourth grade is wrapping up their explorers perspective project.  They considered six explorers and whether these explorers were in fact heroes or villains.  This project has spanned a few weeks and has involved research on six explorers in the social studies standards, persuasive writing, thinking from alternative perspectives, and creating persuasive Flipgrid videos.

You can read about how the project started here.

You can read about our videos and voting procedure here.

Students recorded their persuasive videos using Flipgrid.  We put all of those videos onto a Google site along with forms for voting whether or not each explorer was a villain or a hero.  Over the past few weeks, I have invited people around the world to interact with the project and vote.  I’ve shared through this blog, Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus communities.  It has been amazing to see how many classrooms have viewed the projects and sent us positive tweets and messages about our students’ work.

After sharing their work with the world, the results are in.

Is Christopher Columbus a hero or a villain?

Is John Cabot a hero or a villain?

Is Vasco Nunez de Balboa a hero or a villain?

Is Juan Ponce de Leon a hero or a villain?

 

Is Henry Hudson a hero or a villain?

 

Is Jacques Cartier a hero or a villain?

It looks like most of us look to the explorers as heroes with a big exception for Christopher Columbus.

In addition, our Flipgrid had some very interesting data.  As of this posting:

• The Christopher Columbus question was viewed 530 times and had 186 likes
• The Jacques Cartier question was viewed 148 times and had 65 likes
• The Henry Hudson question was viewed 99 times and had 52 likes
• The Juan Ponce de Leon question was viewed 139 times and had 68 likes
• The Vasco Nunez de Balboa question was viewed 94 times and had 47 likes
• The John Cabot question was viewed 120 times and had 45 likes

This has been such a special project.  I hope that we can do more work like this where classes are viewing one another’s projects, offering feedback, and considering different views.  We will end this project with a connection with the Flipgrid team very soon.

If you want to view the student projects, you can still visit their site.