Learning and Sharing with Ms. Lirenman: Co-Creating with a Class in Iowa

A couple of weeks ago, just before the start of the Global Read Aloud, I was approached by my #1stchat twitter friend Leka DeGroot, from Iowa, to work with her class on a collaborative project for the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. We wanted to co create books as part of the Global Read Aloud.

Leka and I met over a google hang out and worked through all the details. We decided to modify Eric Carle's book from the Very Hungry Caterpillar, to the Very Hungry Student. Our goal was to have each student in our classes illustrate, add text, and voice record a page for one of six books. Leka and I put the pages together and create books. Here's how we made it happen.

Mrs. DeGroot's Class - Saige, Merek, Faith, Jarred

Ms. Lirenman's Class - Carlos, Mya, Yvonne, Brayden

On the first day of the Global Read Aloud our two grade one classes met through a Skype call. We had some curiousity questions for them and they had some for us. We also had some technical difficulties but we didn't let that stop us. We also read the original Eric Carle story together over Skype.

Mrs. DeGroot's Class - Isabella, Keegan, Keagan, Merek

Ms. Lirenman's Class - Keegan, Brenda, Jaslehna, Diego

Once the call was over I talked a little more with my class about this collaborative project that we were going to do with Mrs. DeGroot's class. Each child choose a day of the week and created a picture of some food that a student might eat. Eg. On Wednesday a very hungry student ate three apples. I introduced my students to a new drawing tool - Drawing Pad but also encouraged them to draw in Draw and Tell too. The children could also draw and add their text with non digital tools. We talked about adding text as well using Explain Everything and then recording their voices in either Draw and Tell or Explain Everything on the iPads. My students then saved their mini page movies to the iPad camera roll. I must admit five weeks into grade one there were times when we were in over our heads.

Mrs. DeGroot's Class - Ryker, Benson, Preston, Sam
Ms. Lirenman's Class - Camron, Natasha, Jessica, Amaan

With all the images created, text and voice added, it was time to save the images to dropbox. At the start of the project Leka and I shared dropbox folders with one another. Since we assigned students from both of our classes to each book we needed to share our images with one another. Uploading images from the iPad Dropbox app is easy to do. In fact dropbox is excellent for this. With a shared folder I could easily access her students images and she could access mine.

Mrs. DeGroot's Class - Sicily, Torry, Addison, Blake

Ms. Lirenman's Class - Daniel, Karman, Arun, Karanvir

The books, made in iMovie on the laptop using the page curl transition to make it look like the turning of a page, were then created. I had to be careful that the entire images were shown (I'm not a fan on the ken burns affect when creating books in iMovie). A few items that we shared with one another had issues too so it was a bit of time before all the pages were ready to create the books. Once everything was in order both Leka and I shared our books on YouTube.

Mrs. DeGroot's Class - Kloi, Karter, Abi, Alex

Ms. Lirenman's Class - Jadyn, Simar, Seth, Diego

If you've never co-created with another class it's pretty great to see the smiles on your students faces when they see that their work is part of a bigger book that is shared with the world. There are so many other ways that books can be co-created and I'm hoping as the school year progresses I'll be able to share more ways with you too. And the best part co-creation can be done with one, or ten classes over a variety of content areas. I'd love to see what you co-create.