Informational reports 2.0

I seem to remember back in my high school days doing the old five paragraph reports. You know the ones, they had an introduction, three paragraphs, and a conclusion. At the time I remember accepting this as the way to do reports. Still I remember how in school I would always come to accept things for how they were. I accepted because I had no say in the matter, I did this writing robotically and did pretty good. The problem is that I was greatly disconnected.

Now as a 2nd grade teacher and dealing with a whole new breed of 21 century learners, and being a techie nerd myself, I sought to reinvent the informational report. We had a already done the tried and true paper method where we brainstormed, wrote a first draft and revised our work. The problem was that my poor students were bored to death, and who can blame them? I have often argued that in education we far too often don't consider our audience when we plan lessons. We consider the data they produce, we look at the numbers but we don't look at them as individuals. More importantly we don't consider the types of media that they consume on a daily basis. Go to any chain restaurant at 7pm when the gymnastics and soccer practice is over. The kids sitting at the table are engaged, connected, and consuming everything inside the screen they hold. Apparently kids love screens, but they really love what the screens bring them. They can connect to their friends, share pictures, engage in online gaming etc etc etc.

So what does this mean for 2nd grade informational reports?

There are some things you can not change about an informational report, for example it has to be informational. It also has to have an introduction and a conclusion. All good writing no matter what kind has these elements of being informative/ persuasive/ entertaining and they all introduce and then conclude the action.

So what do you change?

You change the format, and believe me there are plenty of ways to do this. For our reports I gave my students choices which is especially good because you have to consider your kids and thier learning styles. My students were allowed to choose from good ole-fashioned paper, pen.io, or www.smore.com

I didn't have a single one use paper. And for those of you that don't know pen.io is really great and convenient because you don't have to sign up, you just write what you want to write and then post the url it gives you. The problem is that you need a place for it to go. If you teach high school it's easy because most of your students are on Facebook or Twitter. But I teach 2nd grade, luckily all of my students are on Edmodo which is perfect for this kind of thing.

I had two groups use www.smore.com which is an online flier generator. I just decided to use it for my students report. The great thing about it is that you can track where people viewed your flier. Two of my girls did a report about Beyonce. After having it up for 24 hours it had already been viewed by close to 100 people on 5 different continents. I can't begin to tell you how thrilled my students were to see this, plus they got exposure to a map which is a social studies bonus. Plus the map is in google maps format so we got to use the street view function to do a virtual field trip around the world.

Below you will find the Beyonce flier. I found that helping my student put these things together was far less frustrating than trying to convince them that them being able to write a proper report was essential to their success in the real world. Consider your audience and make learning wonderful through technology. If you do this I think that you will find you will leave your classroom with feeling gratified, refreshed, and motivated to go back and do it again.