Seeing is believing! Learning will become more meaningful when my students have increased visual access to text, teacher-modeling, and peer work samples.
While the backgrounds, interests, personalities, and learning styles of my second graders represent a wide range, the students do have a few things in common.
For one, they are all full of curiosity and an eagerness to learn. They are also high-energy and love to be stimulated and engaged at all times throughout the day. As a school, we are working towards enhancing English Language Arts performance through promoting student discourse. We want reading and writing to be more of a collaborative experience, where students can learn from one another. This is especially true for our large English Language Learner population. While my second graders love to create and share their own work, they need increased opportunities to closely examine and analyze their peers' thinking. The document camera will support this type of learning because any document, be it a page of text or a piece of student work, can be instantly displayed on a projector or Smartboard screen.
My Project
The document camera will help to facilitate a variety of engaging learning experiences in our classroom. My students are visual and kinesthetic learners who benefit most from seeing and manipulating things. The document camera, used in conjunction with our classroom Smartboard, will allow us to meet the needs of various learning styles. A read-aloud, for example, will be enhanced when the pages are captured by the camera and displayed for the whole class to see. We then can engage in shared reading experiences, and work towards supporting our ideas about books with text-based evidence. Teacher-modeling will also be much more efficient with the use of the document camera. Across the disciplines, examples and demonstrations will be visible to all students, and in real-time. Finally, the camera will offer students the opportunity to share their thinking. This will promote accountability and allow students to critique and discuss authentic work samples from their peers.
Not only will the document camera support the facilitation of explicit teaching, but it will promote critical thinking within the students.
The shared experience of viewing the same document will engage students, promote their ability to cite evidence for their thinking, hold them accountable for producing work that is clear and ready for sharing, and provide them with increased opportunities for examining and critiquing peer work.
More than half of students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
DonorsChoose is the most trusted classroom funding site for teachers.
As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Almas and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.