Intel Education: Designing Effective Projects: African Adventure Safari


	Designing Effective Projects: African Adventure Safari From the Classroom

Curt Tiffany is a third grade teacher at Manzanita Elementary School in Grants Pass, Oregon. He is an Intel® Teach Program master teacher and uses technology with his young students in a variety of innovative ways.

African Adventure Safari was developed from a curricular theme Curt has used many times in past years. It includes the study of animals, their habitats and culminates in field trips to several wildlife centers. Students also play a computer simulation where they become zookeepers. Students study the needs of animals and try to develop a zoo habitat that closely matches their natural habitat.

As he began teaching the unit, Curt saw the need to make several adjustments. When students saw the splashy cheetah PowerPoint* slideshow that introduced the lessons, they wanted to study endangered animals instead of African animals exclusively. He found that students liked making a brochure, and that PowerPoint was fun. But the Web site was awfully hard for little kids, so he removed this activity from the plan.

Technology and the Early Grades
Curt’s experience with young learners and technology has helped him develop many appropriate strategies for using technology with this age group:

Microsoft PowerPoint* presentations. Curt recognizes that this is a powerful communication tool, and has added some new touches that make it especially effective for small children. Kids narrate their slides and have the text spoken in their own voice as the slides roll along. This is perfect for open house, with looping presentations on individual computers. It also supports the student audience, which is made up of emerging readers.
Speech-to-text software. Speech-to-text software allows Curt’s students to turn spoken words into text. Because kids can speak more words than they can write, this encourages fluency and full expression of their ideas. Students take the resulting text files and can revise their “writing,” gaining practice in the structure and punctuation of sentences.
Text-to-speech: Curt uses software that makes computers “read aloud” what is on the screen. During online research, this gives information that might otherwise be out of reach for emerging readers or students with reading disabilities.
Citations. Kids learn to give credit for other’s work by embedding URLs, then copying links to a works cited page. At this age, Curt thinks “giving credit where credit is due” is the concept he wants to develop, and that real citation is too hard and can be developed in later grades.

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