iPad Essentials: Researching Influential People

When January comes along, one of my favorite standards to dive into is biographies, research, and the influential people that have impacted our world!

I am excited to share the latest project Cristina and I have completed!   This unit will help you cover your standards for researching influential people while also providing a means to cover a multitude of technology and ELA standards in the process! All of our units are CC aligned for your convenience and assurance that what you are doing in your classroom is on target for today’s learner.   Best of all, we bring the tech to you!  Let us teach your students with the included video tutorial!

Here’s how we took the large concept of research, writing, and reporting, and broke it down into small easily manageable tasks for you and your students!

First of all we included a detailed lesson explanation, complete with standards, objectives, and student requirements.  Depending on the age of students in your care, you can adjust the amount of work to be completed.  Because I teach first grade I kept my first graders in mind the entire time!  Cristina teaches k-5, so she kept the older kids in mind!  Together we have created a unit that will work for students 1st-5th!

Begin with the video tutorial.  Get familiar with the project and the technology.  Once you feel ready, you can show it to your students as your anticipatory set or lesson engage!   For younger students, you will discuss and review each part as needed.  I would model the process with an influential person of my own before having students begin with their own influential person.  Older or more advanced students will be able to jump right in!

There are 16 different influential people in this unit.  Each person has an information sheet to help kick start the research process.  Find the right level of information page for your students.  There are three levels for each influential person; advanced, proficient, and intermediate.  If you have struggling readers that are unable to read independently with the intermediate readers, you can partner students or keep them in a small group with you during the research component.

The information sheets are terrific for helping students find the basics about their influential person, but bringing in books, accessing biography for kids websites, and using our fact and quotes pages will also help your students discover more about their influential person!

Each influential person also includes a bio sheet that contains pictures, facts, and quotes to inspire connections.

One area that we chose to focus on was how to avoid plagiarism and how to give credit to your sources.  We kept it very simple and basic because this is important to understand whether you are in first grade or 5th!  In the video tutorial, there is a mini-lesson on how to take information and put it into your own words!  Along with that we created a simple citation sheet so students can be sure to list their sources.  Whether it is a website, info sheet, or children’s biography book, students can write the title and author on a citation sheet.

We really wanted to keep the research component easy.  To help provide structure for both beginning and advanced writers we made a template for research.  Giving students a template of what to look for can help them process what they are reading.  Choose to use one of our pre-made research templates to help students with note-taking and organization!

This information will become the basis for your students to share out with their audience of peers, school staff, or parents!  Help them become “fluent” with their information by using these research cue cards! 

Another component to understanding and synthesizing the content is to make a fun game out of the process.  Once students have their facts, we want them to become familiar with sharing it and we want them to form their own ideas and opinions about the research they have done!  We created different versions of these critical thinking question cubes!  Have students roll and share in partners to help practice speaking about their influential person.  This activity can also serve as a fun ice breaker for sharing out with special guests that come to hear presentations!

Once students have researched and are ready to bring the research to life, we have the technology part of the lesson to really make this content have a lasting beneficial impact on your students!

The first {free} app we will teach will help students with the speaking and listening component to sharing! How to have a presenter’s voice.

The second {free} app we share in our video tutorial and lesson plans is how to bring the influential person to life!  Students will report through their influential person’s mouth! 

Here’s a quick snippet for an example!

Once your students are ready, you can share a living museum with an authentic audience!  Have another class come through, school staff, or invite parents for a culminating project!

To help you keep track of which students are researching which people, we created a checklist for you.  There is a blank on for you as well if you want to include your own requirements!

To purchase this unit, you can find it here!

Here’s another fun look at the unit!

 

Looking for more iPad Essential units?  Find them here!