My Favorite Dinosaur

Third grade students at Dunbar Elementary are having their first adventure using laptop computers. They are using the laptops to do Internet research on the dinosaur of their choice. After they find the required information, they are creating a presentation using SMART Notebook which they will present to the class using a SMART Board.

While planning for this activity, I found some great web sites for the students to use for their research:

• http://www.livescience.com/dinosaurs/
• http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/
• http://kids.yahoo.com/dinosaurs
• http://dsc.discovery.com/guides/dinosaur/dinosaur.html
• http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dinosaurs/
• http://www.kidsdinos.com/

The children will work on the project for about 90 minutes one day a week through the end of February. At first, the set-up each day is a little slow. As the students get better starting up the computers and logging in, they have more and more time to do the "fun stuff"--Internet research and creating their presentation.

I like this project because it gives us the opportunity to teach some important (and really boring) technology skills as we work to teach science and language objectives.