Success Stories

How does a teacher measure student success? It isn't always about grades. Sometimes it is about student buy-in to a particular assignment or the quality of the skills that were used to create a product.

Over the course of the year I have guided my students on how to use the full capacity of Flipgrid and Adobe Spark. My hope is for them to learn how to use both in what we call in education as "app mashing." I can now say without hesitation that the goal has been met.

Without any prompting at all my students put together some fantastic presentations for an assignment on the Push and Pull Factors of Immigration.

First,I must note the assignment gave them the opportunity to tell their family's story. This alone fulfilled the student engagement component of the lesson. Second was the ability to create an authentic product with without restrictions other than using public domain images.

All of the assignments which were turned in were extremely engaging and well produced. But I would like to share what really made my day. Some of my students decided to first create their piece on Adobe Spark utilizing the music, speaking, text, and image function for each of their slides and then without needing any assistance uploaded their image to Flipgrid. Mind you, this is not initially an easy task as it involves multiple steps of editing, publishing, downloading and then uploading to Flipgrid. I was overwhelmed with emotion as I came across one after another of the videos which the students took the assignment that extra step. Forget grading, testing and the like. This was a true victory in a year full of stress and tragedy. Bottom line, as educators it is important to celebrate these small successes.