Sunday, February 9, 2014

Using Tech Tours for a Meaningful Homework Experience


My 5th graders had a favorite poem that they liked to recite, most of the students had learned this in second grade and they still had it memorized:

    Homework! Oh, Homework!
    I hate you! You stink!
    I wish I could wash you
    away in the sink,
    if only a bomb
    would explode you to bits.
    Homework! Oh, homework!
    You're giving me fits.
    I'd rather take baths
    with a man-eating shark,
    or wrestle a lion
    alone in the dark,
    eat spinach and liver,
    pet ten porcupines,
    than tackle the homework,
    my teacher assigns.
    Homework! Oh, homework!
    you're last on my list,
    I simply can't see
    why you even exist,
    if you just disappeared
    it would tickle me pink.
    Homework! Oh, homework!
    I hate you! You stink!
    — "Homework! Oh, Homework!" by Jack Prelutsky


I made sure to share the "Why?" for homework with my students. I included some research such as this:
Brain research studies conducted by Hermann Ebbinghaus on memory produced the forgetting curve
that showed that approximately 70% of learned material that has no previous association
or meaning for the student is forgotten within three days. (Wolfe, 2001)

We talked about the importance of sharing our learning with others, and talked about how our families could be an awesome audience for this! This is when we came up with the idea of "Tech Tours." Students would take their families on a tour, each night, to a variety of online resources that they had contributed to such as IXL Math, Discovery Education Student Center, Kidblog, and our class Edmodo page. I helped students out by writing up some guiding questions for families to use when taking these "Tech Tours."  It was important to remind families and the learners that these were spaces that we were in the process of learning, rather than places to be assessed for final grades.

Homework can be meaningful when students are sharing about something that they have discovered, created, or experienced when learning.







Wolfe, P. (2001) Brain Matters. Association for Curriculum and Development.
Alexandria, VA.


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