The way I started was by quickly reading off the names of several famous people from 18th Century America who played a role in the Revolutionary War. I tried to give a short comment on each, but wasn't able to do that for about a third of them due to my own personal lack of knowledge. I used this as an opportunity to encourage my kids to teach me about those people and help me with future classes!
I gave my students a checklist of tasks that were required (download the whole project PDF), some that had choices, and told them that five tasks must be checked off every two weeks in order to stay on schedule. I would be checking every two weeks to make sure no one fell behind. If anyone fell behind, I would strongly encourage them to attend Homework Club (a time to work in the classroom before school, during lunch recess, and after school every day) until they got caught back up. I, of course, would be happy to help in any way necessary!
I showed them a completed poster from a previous year and stated that it was not necessarily an exemplar, but rather an example of a completed project. Their creativity and design ideas would be necessary to take their project from complete to outstanding!
Along the way, I gave class time to do everything and encouraged students to spend a little time at Homework Club to stay on track. I taught mini-lessons for each item on the poster and spent a lot of time getting my students to create banners for their hero's name and digital travel brochures (all done on Microsoft Word).
Once my students finished their posters, it was time to introduce a cool tech tool that would help spread our learning across the globe: ThingLink! One of my favorite tech tools around! ThingLink allows people to take a photo and insert tags anywhere on the photo. These tags can link to new websites, pop up videos, display new photos, or give information! (Here is a video I did where I explain quite a few other ways I've used ThingLink in the classroom.)
The image above is interactive. Hover over it & click on the tags!
To start, I partnered each of my students up with sticks and had them record each other reading/explaining all the parts of their poster on our iPads. After uploading these videos to YouTube, we opened them in TubeChop and began to separate the video into its component parts (e.g. one video for the summary, one video for the poem, etc.). Next, we took a picture of our poster and imported it into ThingLink. Students added a tag for each component on their poster and linked it to its respective TubeChop video! Now, whenever anyone hovers over a part of the poster that they want to know more about, they can watch the video explaining it!
This project was a ton of fun for my students and is a ton of fun for me! The objective above has been more than "covered" and the students have a semi-permanent digital footprint documenting their learning! In addition, we always reflect on our learning and synthesize the information at the end of an activity like this (here is one student example). So, students hopefully gained more from this activity due to the technological additions than just novelty!
To answer the question in the title of this post, I do think that this particular technology addition improved student learning and motivation. I don't back that up with data, because I won't test my students on this, but if you ask them about their Revolutionary War Hero in the coming months, I would bet they would have a lot to talk to you about!
It's also important to note that all of these projects were completed 100% in class. (One student took his home one night without permission, came back the next day with it completely done (with major parent-support) and I had him do another one without any support. We called the first one his "practice" poster.) I think it's so important that fifth graders learn that they can do these projects without an adult making every decision and being too involved. Independence has to be nurtured and that can't be done if adults interfere too greatly!