{"id":9053,"date":"2016-03-18T08:15:39","date_gmt":"2016-03-18T12:15:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/?p=9053"},"modified":"2022-04-14T13:46:11","modified_gmt":"2022-04-14T17:46:11","slug":"leonardo-da-vincis-smartphone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/leonardo-da-vincis-smartphone\/","title":{"rendered":"Leonardo da Vinci’s Smartphone"},"content":{"rendered":"

History from the Inside Out<\/h1>\n

\"howEvery two years our team does an interdisciplinary unit on the European Renaissance. I’m a big believer in learning history from the inside out, by asking students to really look at individual people. I also wanted to do something that connected things that kids were interested in to this time period. To get them to really feel as if they were some of these people, it just made sense to connect modern technology using the smartphone, since many of them are on their smartphones a lot of the time anyway.<\/p>\n

So what would happen if you found Leonardo DaVinci\u2019s smartphone?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Rubric and technology integration<\/h3>\n

My Grade 7-8 students created the smartphone of a historical figure from the Renaissance. Here are the assignment sheet<\/a> and rubric<\/a> that I gave to students.<\/p>\n

Students used Google Draw to create the home screen of the smartphone based on this template<\/a>. Then they used ThingLink<\/a> to make the icons interactive. The Snagit<\/a> Chrome Extension was used extensively for screenshots throughout the project.<\/p>\n

Also, throughout the year we talk about primary source and artifacts that allow you to learn about a historical time. What would be on there that would tell you about him as a person and the culture in which he lived?<\/p>\n

Students need to access the same kind of information that you would find in a formal research paper. It’s just done in a different way. One of my goals to get kids to understand that the same legitimate research has to go into any project no matter what the product is that you are creating.<\/p>\n

Renaissance Smartphone<\/h2>\n

During this interdisciplinary unit, all core subject matter areas are teaching about the same time period. So students are meeting people in every class and they keep a keep a list of all the different people that they meet – scientists, mathematicians, writers, etc. This running list of all the different people is the raw material that they can use for the information in their smartphone.<\/p>\n

At the end of the second week of the unit I explain the smartphone assignment and students are really psyched. \u201cWait a minute, we get to do what now? This will be cool!\u201d The technology piece really motivates them to do the research and to do the learning.<\/p>\n

When I did this project two years ago, I had drawn on some ideas from other teachers. I had students create Google docs based on templates of the five components: contact list, text messages, music playlist, calendar and apps. I gave them a few rules of realism such as only communicating with somebody who was alive at the same time. Students really delved into who these people were as they considered what they cared about and how they might spend their time.<\/p>\n

Renaissance Smartphone 2.0<\/h3>\n
\"This
Raphael’s smartphone. This student focused on Chrome apps as a way of exploring the Chromebook app store.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This year I wanted to add an element of having it actually look like a smartphone where they could touch different buttons and it would open up to the information. So I made a template on Google Draw of the smartphone screen that students modified by adding the icons for the various apps that they were using. After customizing the picture of the smartphone screen using Google Draw, they saved it as a JPEG and then imported that into ThingLink, where they linked in their documents for the five components.<\/p>\n

In addition to linking to the five Google documents, some students did extensions such as linking to YouTube videos or lyrics of the songs on their playlist, or creating an Instagram photo album for their person. One student even created an actual Instagram account!<\/p>\n