Professional Learning Goals

• Learned the use of new technologies, thus being able to keep our classrooms current and relevant
• Learned how to promote the idea of student-directed projects and goals
• Learned how to help students create enriched multidisciplinary projects that allow for greater scope and collaboration among various classes

Activities and Resources

Throughout the course of the project, we held various meetings both during and outside school hours to determine what materials we would need, how to build our project, as well as what software we needed to create for it. There were various teachers and students involved during each of these phases.

For the most part, this project was very much a prototyping-style project where we would attempt something, figure out what worked and what didn’t, and then repeat.

Meeting on a regular basis with the core team ensured that we all were aware of what everyone was doing and allowed us to share knowledge and resources that we had acquired with each other. Sharing the responsibilities of the project made it much more feasible to create and finish.

Unexpected Challenges

The construction of the mirror itself proved to be the most difficult part of the whole project. We had a hard time putting all the parts together in a manner that was sturdy, attractive and inexpensive. Eventually we settled on a wooden box for the creation of the frame, and also removed the cover off the back of the monitor to get it to fit into the box properly.

Power was also an issue. We needed a laptop to run the software on the mirror and this laptop needed to be small enough to hide behind the mirror, powerful enough to run the software, and had enough battery life that it could run for hours without the need to plug in.

Enhancing Student Learning and Development

Whenever students come up with an idea for a project and you allow them the opportunity to develop that project there will always be more effort put forth. This leads to greater learning as well as a better final product.

Our project does not inherently cause this to happen. With a different group of students, this would not have been the correct approach to take. However, we had a group of students and teachers that were excited about this project and its possibilities. As such, the learning and growth that happened during the duration of the project was great.

Sharing

Our mirror project will be put on display within the school (location still to be determined). This will allow for all students and teachers to see it and interact with it. A group email will go out to all teachers to inform them what it is and how it works before it goes live. All teachers will be encouraged to ask questions if they are interested in adding to the project in future years.

We also have a secondary mirror built that will be kept permanently in the classroom. This is to allow for the creation of new materials/apps for the mirror, as well as the enhancement of existing ones. Keeping it visible in the classroom will allow us to share this project in a more detailed way with our students. It will also be used for discussion with parents of students that come to our classroom on various nights, such as during our school tour night.

Project Evaluation

The project was a success. All students and teachers involved learned a lot during the course of the year and also had fun working on it.

We accomplished all that we set out to as noted in the Goals section. In fact, it turned out that there were more people interested in helping out with the project than initially anticipated. In the end, we were able to create our magic mirror, learned a lot about construction, touch technologies, UI design and software development, and had the ability to create a secondary mirror so that one could be kept on display while the other one could still be used in class for further development opportunities.

This project will be able to continue being used in the future and will thus continue to help new teachers and students on an ongoing basis learn how to leverage new technologies.