Opinion Writing...hot topic issues!

     This week has been a challenging one!  Let's just say I am so happy to have a 3 day weekend.  :-) 
     We have been working on Opinion Writing.  My students have been debating the hot topic of whether or not to allow students to have cell phones at school.  Even though these guys are 9 and 10 years old they have some strong opinions on the topic.  Over the last two weeks the students have been writing a 5 paragraph opinion piece on the cell phone issue.  They have been using Google Docs to type their finished stories.  On the SAMR Model this is at the Augmentation level, typing their stories using Spell Check, centering their title, and changing their font.  I have always wanted to take this task "above the line" to the Modification level and have them share it with each other and comment on each others stories....I will have to save that for another time!
     So for this weeks assignment, I thought what better way to kick it up a notch than to have them make an iMovie to try to sway their audience members.  This covers one of my goals I have set for myself and my students on ISTE-S 2a, to collaborate with their peers on making something in the digital environment.  I didn't know how to make an iMovie, but I knew some of my kids did.  (Thank you Deanna Owen!) I had those kids give me a lesson on how to make one and then they got to teach it to the rest of the class.  I have been learning about the pedagogy in teaching and it tells me that I need to let my kids create, teach each other, and learn from each other.  So they did, they made iMovies this week.  They worked in groups of 5-6 with one iPad and set out to convince each other that cell phones were a good thing at school or not.
     I do have to say selecting the iMovie after I had the base of my lesson was a good thing.  I got to focus on teaching how to write an opinion piece of writing and then this week the iMovie was a bonus.  I didn't stress out about how it was going to turn out because I didn't know I was going to do it.  For me I got to move this lesson to the Redefinition level because they got to create something on the iPad and share it with other students.