The Ends

The fourth grade is part of a pilot program at Hartford using online portfolios. This  year each student has created a portfolio and are now beginning to put in work that they are proud to show their academic success.  This week we started to dig deeper into these mysterious things called, "The Ends."

The idea of the online portfolios is that they will be used by every student in the district for their entire school career. It will be a place to collect work that they have done that shows how far they have come in all aspects of being a student. These aspects are broken down into what are called, The Ends. They include: Citizenship, Life Skills, Health and Well Being, Global Awareness, Academic Excellence, and Technology/ Information Skills.

The fourth grade team decided to start the process slowly. We chose to focus only on two areas this year, technology and academic excellence.  So this week we began to really look at Technology and Information Skills and what that means to our students. We broke down this end into manageable goals that the students could understand. We asked them to brainstorm ways that they are already showing and demonstrating their knowledge of this particular End.  We then broke them into smaller groups and gave them each one goal to focus on. Each group came up with a skit that could be used to teach younger students about the Technology End. Here is the video that they created.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuLvSKjfVEk