Addressing Senioritis

What are some strategies for keeping senior focused during the last weeks of school (ha!)?

I am using hyperlinked narratives, Photo Story projects, online field trips (Holocaust Museum) and other activities during study of a novel. They keep asking "How will I use this in the real world?" To which I reply, the technology applications you can use.

Tags: activities., seniors, strategies, technology

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Permalink Reply by Diana Laufenberg on April 9, 2007 at 10:36pm

Well, when I taught Senior Government classes I had an interesting end of the year project. All year the students wrote newspaper article summary reviews. They kept a folder with each of the submissions. At the end of the year the students would get out all of the summaries and pick out one per month that they thought was important, odd, or interesting. The students would then form groups; each group member would contribute one idea per month. Here is where it became more entertaining... they would then use the articles to make a song or poem that had one verse per month. Most kids made them into songs... it was a riot. This was before the onset of Web 2.0, so in this age I would probably encourage them to record the song, incorporate the images that correspond with the songs and then make a compilation movie of all the assignments. It would be like a yearbook for current events in the 06-07 school year. I still have the videos on VHS... they are pure entertainment!

As far as 'real world' connections, the ability to tell a compelling story, arrange divergent ideas, work in collaborative groups, think creatively, perform and publish are all skills of the workplace in the 21st century.

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Permalink Reply by Carolyn Foote on April 10, 2007 at 5:55am

We are looking at campus wide senior projects as a way to make the senior year more worthwhile overall for our students. I'd be interested to know if any of you do those?

You're right that they will use some of this after high school--for example, Best Buy uses wikis for their employees to review projects--Ebay's manual is a wiki--Microsoft has a number of internal and external blogs--on and on. Companies are using these tools.

Of course, no matter what we do with seniors, it is the last few weeks of school. I wouldn't say their reaction is inevitable, but it sounds familiar!