Lincoln Elementary School

For a college school field trip, we visited Lincoln Elementary School in Cedar Falls, Iowa to observe a class using Google Sketchups and another class using their Interative Whiteboard.  I will focus on the Google Sketchups for this post, since my next covers the whiteboards in more detail.  When obvserving a 5th grade class in the computer lab, students were given an assignment earlier in the year to design some type of building they could live in on another outer space planet.  By giving them a fun, open topic, students can become engaged by taking it whichever way they want.  Students skills in using Google SketchUp were all more advanced than mine since I had never seen it before that day.  The teacher was a proactive teacher in the sense that he learned how to use Google Sketchup from one of his friends who was an engineer so he could better teach his students and meet their needs.  I think it's extremely important teachers are as familar about a topic as they can be so they can provide students with as much knowledge to master the skills they are learning as well.  It's just as important to be honest when you don't know something as a teacher which provides opportunities to learn alongside your students.  This can be extremely valueable and demonstrates how learning is a life-long process that never truely ends and there's always more to know! When my teacher asked students to raise their hand if they worked on this project at home with their own time, almost every students raised their hand which I thought was great!  That showed students were truly interested in it and wanted to do a quality job with it.  There's many outlets to use Google Sketchups, this math project using dimensions just being one of the many options!  Students can also use these skills learned for future school projects and possibly for their future careers.

Photograph taken by Katrina Bauer - All students working on their projects using Google SketchUp in the computer lab.

Photograph taken by Katrina Bauer - Individual Student working on his project using Google SketchUp.

Here is a 7 minute tutorial video on YouTube about how to get started with Google SketchUp!