Team Create: Story Collages

This is a Google collage I created to tell students and others my story. 

Yesterday our teaching team met to share ideas and plan for the year ahead. We detailed, organized, and synthesized multiple ideas, events, dates, and times into a first draft of the shared teaching/learning schedule and program.

One idea that we developed together and contributed to was the "My Story Google Collage" project. The project, as depicted above, will take the following steps:

• Each teacher will create an exemplar Google collage of his/her life.
• We'll introduce ourselves to the students in each homeroom group with the collage exemplars.
• Each teacher will also create a Google presentation for their homeroom with a blank slide for each child.
• We'll teach/review how to make a Google presentation with students, and show them how they can find and upload digital images and employ Google Draw, fonts, color, and format to make their stories inviting to read and look at. At this time, we'll also review good digital citizenship since this is the first tech project of the year. 
• We'll give the students a chance to create a sketch plan of their collage on paper first during the first day of school.
• On the second day of school, students will start creating their collages using computers. We'll coach and assist.
• Finally, once the homeroom presentations are complete, students will present their slides to each other, and after that, we'll publish the slide show for family members and grade-level educators and students. 
• We may even introduce presentation skills through this project and encourage students to practice their slide presentation with family members and friends prior to presenting their slide to the class. 

As noted in a recent college and career ready post, a first step to building team, and an important step for readying students for their future, is "know thyself." Creating Google collages is one way to build that skill and knowledge.