Mini Challenges that turned out HUGE!

Yesterday was the first time that I had an opportunity to meet with my Digital Learning Team for an entire day. It was so good to bounce ideas off of each other and to see the progress we had made in only a month. For the past couple of weeks, one of my teachers had been focused on doing mini-challenges in her classroom. A mini-challenge is basically a task you give a student in which they have to figure out how to do on their own. This makes an excellent time for students to "press buttons" in apps and see what various tools do. Anyways, the goal for today was for students to pair up with partners and create a voice recording in which they talked about a weather instrument. From there, they would have to figure out how to make this happen. For about the first 3 minutes students kept coming up to ask us how to do certain things, but our responses were pretty much, "Figure it out on your own!" As some might see this as rejection, I personally see it where students have opportunities to use higher level thinking, problem solving skills and rational thinking. Once students started figuring out how to add their pictures and voice to it, they started helping each other! People wanted to see their peers succeed! How awesome is that!? The end result looked a little like this:

I am so proud of the teacher as well as the students that made this happen! To some people this might just seem like a picture with a voice to it, but to me, I saw it as students taking pride in creating a finished product!