In “Innovate with iPad: Lessons to Transform Learning in the Classroom” primary teachers Karen Lirenman and Kristen Wideen provide a complete selection of clearly laid out engaging open-ended lessons to change the way you use iPad in the classroom.
In this grade two 3-D Geometry iTunes U Course, students will explore attributes of 3-D objects using concrete materials and drawings. Students will also build and construct 3-D objects and models as well as develop language to describe geometric concepts.
Discover how to keep parents informed, connect globally and link to your curriculum. This One Best Thing leads your primary classroom students through the creation of a learning network on Twitter.
I have had many requests lately for more ideas on how to incorporate iPads into math. I wanted to share one easy way to take information from a math worksheet and transform it into an engaging and content creating activity.
The Worksheet
The Transformation
I used the ideas from this worksheet and decided to fill ziplock baggies with buttons for every two students. I wrote the expectations on a piece of chart paper, modeled what I wanted them to do using Apple T.V., an iPad and a content creation app of their choice. Here is a picture of the directions I posted for the students:
The Result
This particular student chose to use the app, Explain Everything to show their learning.
Example 2
Transformation
I had one of my students sort through a bucket of dominoes to pick out all the doubles. I placed them on the floor infront of the kids and asked them what they say. We talked about double facts and how they are an addition strategy. I then modeled using Apple T.V. how to use the Superhero HD App to create a video to illustrate different double facts. Then I let them loose.
The Result
This video was created using the Superhero HD App
These are just two simple examples of how to move beyond an eight and half by eleven sheet of paper and give students a choice of how they want to create and share their learning.
We are in full swing in the second part of our Primary Blogging Community activities. (Here is an older post describing what The Primary Blogging Community is) Back in October and November we built relationships with our groups by visiting and commenting on each others' classroom blogs. Some groups used Skype and Google Hangout to give a "face" to the classes we were blogging with. The second part of the blogging community started the second week in January. Instead of exploring and commenting on classroom blogs, we are focusing on students blogs. My class was the first focus class in my group. This means 4 other classes read and commented on my students' kidblogs that week. This was a great opportunity to generate some interest and excitement around my students' blogs. On the first day there were 20 new comments from Mrs. Leech's class. By Friday, my students had over 130 comments from other students on their blogs. You can envision the excitement and energy in my class each day when my students would come in and go straight to their blogs searching and reading their new comments from the day before. Along with generating excitement, it has generated an urgency for my children to write new posts. When we do an activity on the iPads, my students want to know when they can post their learning on their blogs. A few days ago we were creating popplets for science on the Popplet App. It was so amazing to see how my students were so concerned with uploading their learning to their blogs so their "friends" could respond. My students are becoming more aware of who their audience is and the purpose of their writing. I asked them this morning why they wanted to upload their Popplets to their blogs, and they responded with, "So we can teach other grade 1 and 2 students about solids and liquids!" We are now in our fourth week of the Primary Blogging Community and my students are learning new things from other students' blogs. Today we went on Mrs. Ziemke's classes' blogs and my students listened to the posts that children created using croak.it. Now my students want to learn how to use it on their blogs. We also looked to see how many people have visited our kidblogs since October. Over 10000 people! I can't think of a better reason than that to help engage your reluctant writers to write. They have a purpose, they have an audience and they are excited and engaged in the activity. We will be starting a new Primary Blogging Session in March. If you are interested in joining this wonderful group of educators and you want to give your students a fantastic opportunity to learn, share, and grow with their peers please sign up here and I will be in touch with you.
I have done many blog posts on collections of apps that my students and I use in our classroom. However, I am always open for suggestions on new apps to try. When my good friend Karen Lirernman urged me to try Draw and Tell, I didn't jump at it right away. I was completely content using the content creation apps I had like Showme and Explain Everything. Karen kept on bringing up the fact that this particular app was perfect for primary students and she knew if we tried it we would love it. So, we bought the app ($1.99) and started playing with it in my grade 1/2 classroom. You can draw, colour, take pictures, add stickers and then explain your thinking. Students also have choices with backgrounds, crayons, pencils and paint for their creations. I have to admit that Karen was right..... we love this app! It is very easy for my students to use and there are so many ways to incorporate the app into any subject in your classroom. My students love how easy it is to record their voice with a picture they have drawn or taken and with the touch of a button they can save it to their camera roll. The reason they love this app so much is they can easily show and explain their work and upload it to their kidblogs effortlessly with this app. The following examples have been done independently by my students:
Incorporating it into our Math Stations
For this particular station, I asked the students to use the organizer provided to show how you can make the amount of $1.00 four different ways and to take a picture of their work, explain it, then upload it to their blog. Here is a finished example:
Incorporating it into our Literacy Stations
In December, we were working on procedural writing. I asked the students to create a procedural piece on how to decorate a christmas tree. My students were using the BookCreator app to create their book and used the Draw and Tell app to first draw their pictures for the story. They started out with a bare tree, saved it to the camera roll and then uploaded the picture to their book. With each step they added to their tree, saved it to their camera roll and used it in their story. Here is a picture from one of my student's completed books:
Making our Blog Avatars
Just this past week, the students made avatars for their blogs. Guess what app they used to draw their avatars? You guessed it! Students drew their avatar in Draw and Tell and saved it to the camera roll. I have it set up so all my student's pictures and videos are automatically saved into my dropbox folder, so I can access their work from any computer or iPad. Here are a few of my students' avatars:
If you have not tried this app out with your class, I highly suggest you try it! If you would like to see more examples of how we use Draw and Tell in our classroom, check out my students blogs here.
Apple technologies have transformed my learning environment from a 4-wall classroom to a no wall classroom. Never before, were we able to connect, communicate, collaborate and create on a local, national and global scale with such ease and transparency.
My primary classroom has gone from using large quantities of paper to going virtually paperless. Dropbox accounts on the iPads are used to save work. Students use blogs as digital portfolios. The ease of the Kidblog App has ensured that my students can independently upload videos, text, and pictures to their blogs effortlessly. Apple intuition makes these apps a breeze for my early learners.
My students are no longer “absorbing” the curriculum through the teacher. They are creating and playing with the information we discover together. They are using the iPads to create videos to teach other students how to make patterns, how to read and how to tell time. They are creating interactive books about insects and spiders and “how to books” using video they have taken themselves. They are making their learning visible for the world to see using content creation apps.
When you combine the power of an Apple TV, projector, and the iPad the adaptability of technology is endless. We use the Apple TV, iPad and projector in various combinations to enable different types of activities. My students can now share what they are doing to the entire class with the touch of a button. My students are all physically involved in the learning instead of 20 children watching one child up at an Interactive Whiteboard. As for transforming my teaching, Apple TV has provided a mobile platform from which classroom activities can be initiated. I can now use different apps to display video, and teach lessons from anywhere in my classroom and allow my students to participate from wherever they are seated in a variety of interactive activities.
Apple technologies have allowed my students to be able to connect with students from all over the world. The world is larger than my students had imagined and Apple brings it to the carpet. As well as learning from each other, we are learning from other students and teachers in different cities, provinces and countries. We learned about perspective this past month on Google Hangout by a teacher in British Columbia. When the hurricane hit New York last year, my students wanted to send out a tweet to their Twitter friends in New York to make sure they were okay. My learners have a wealth of information at their fingertips. Students are able to connect with others individually or in small groups using Facetime, Google Hangout and Skype.
We have connected with other classrooms through our classroom blog and the students’ personal blogs. We share our learning and our questions using our classroom Twitter account. We have also participated in a collaborative writing unit. The students wrote their entire rough draft on their blogs and a class from British Columbia provided feedback. We wrote our final drafts using the LittleBirdTales App on the iPads and uploaded the final projects to our blogs.
Just this past month, we created a video using the green screen and iMovie to illustrate our traditions and cultures. Other classes responded to our video and made their own media projects to share with us about their personal traditions and cultures. The best way to experience what learning in 1/2W looks like is to take a look at the following video:
If you are interested in the iPad Expectation posters you saw in the video (my talented husband @mrwideen made them). You can download them here.
This week during literacy I have been teaching my students about different thinking strategies while reading. I began the week doing a lesson on background knowledge. I decided to model the strategy using a non fiction book about penguins. I continued the lesson today, using the same book, focusing on "how to spot new learning" when you are reading. I modeled this strategy by reading one page at a time and the kids and I would turn a flashlight on each time we learned something new. There was a lot of lights flashing and the kids loved the activity! After we got the hang of it I handed out the iPads and we used a "new to us" app called iBrainstorm. This app looks like a cork board and students are able to place sticky notes onto the board. When you are finished you can save it to the camera roll and upload it to you blog. My student's favourite question these days is, "Can I embed it onto my blog?" so I have to be very careful not to disappoint them! Here are a few examples of their blog posts using iBrainstorm:
If you would like to see other examples or would like to comment on any of my students' blogs (which they would be thrilled about) please click here. Later in the day we did some penguin art. I am telling you this because I was amazed at what some of my students did when they had completed their work. I had a few students ask me if they could go on their blogs while the rest of the class finished their art, and of course I said, "Yes!" I didn't notice what they were doing on their blogs until I got home this evening and looked over their blogs. Some of my students had taken pictures of their art project, opened it in Skitch, labelled the picture and uploaded it to their blogs! I am so thrilled with how my class is taking charge of their learning and thinking outside of the box. Here is one of the blog posts I am talking about:
I had to add the bottom comment to the picture because less than 2 hours later, she already had a comment from another primary student from British Columbia that wants to know how she did that. I can't wait for her to respond and hopefully Jaiden from B.C. will learn something new and want to try out the app Skitch if he/she hasn't already!
I recently saw a picture that was posted on twitter by George Couros. I sent it to my principal because it sums up what we have been talking about for weeks about Apps that we are using with the iPads. Here is the picture:
This slide is the inspiration for this blog post. I personally, have been on a crusade to let my students create rather than spoon feed them content. I want them to play with the information I give them, I went them to feel a sense of ownership of the knowledge and I want them to create something using the knowledge I have given them.
William Glasser is famous for the following information about how we learn:
How We Learn 10% of what we READ 20% of what we HEAR 30% of what we SEE 50% of what we SEE and HEAR 70% of what is DISCUSSED with OTHERS 80% of what is EXPERIENCED PERSONALLY 95% of what we TEACH TO SOMEONE ELSE ~William Glasser
An ongoing theme in my classroom is to make your learning visible. My students are in grade 1 and 2, and they already know that they have a huge audience on their personal blogs. We talk about who and why they are creating videos about the content we are learning in class. My students want to teach other students and peers about what they are learning about. It is also a great assessment piece for me, however, they don't see me as their audience anymore. My students now feel a sense of accomplishment and purpose for what they are doing. I'm sure they always did, however not to this magnitude.
Here is a screen shot of the most popular content creation apps we are currently using in my classroom.
I was going to write a brief summary of each app, but then I realized that you can easily read a summary on the internet. Instead, I will try to link a student created piece from my grade 1/2 classroom to the top 10 most used content creation apps we use.
1. Puppet Pals - Here is a link to one of my student's blogs using puppet pals to show adding and subtracting. Chloe's Blog (My students love comments, by the way...)
2. iMovie - Here is our "Traditions and Cultures Project" Video
3. Educreations - Here is a video of a math assessment my students did on time. They were given a cue card with different times written on it and had to create a video on Educreations showing their learning of time. 4. Draw and Tell - Here is a link to one of my student's blogs using Draw and Tell to show the words she has created from the "at" family. Destinee's Blog
5. Explain Everything - This is a video using the Explain Everything app from our Procedural Writing Unit.
6. ShowMe - In this video a student is teaching others about patterning.
7. Popplet - This is a screen shot of one of my grade 1's popplets. He was showing his learning about spiders.
9. Book Creator - We love using this app, however there is no embed option, so we can see the pictures on a blog but you can't hear the audio. We are hoping for an update to make this app even more wonderful! Here is a picture from one of our Non Fiction Insect Books .
8. LittleBirdTales - We just completed our Personal Narratives on the LittleBirdTales App. We will definitely be using this app again in the near future. Here is a link to one of my students personal narratives on their blogs.
9. Kidblog - My students are avid bloggers. This app has opened up their world to blogging. They are able to add pictures and videos easily and independently even at the age of six! Please visit our blogs and leave us a comment here
10. ScribblePress - Here is a book written by a couple of my students about school Scribble Press. These are only a sample of things that we have done with these apps. I hope that this post has ignited your creative juices and you are thinking of how you could use some of these content creation apps in your classroom. I would love to hear what kind of things you are creating in your classroom!
Last week we began our Procedural Writing Unit. We began the unit immersing the students with different procedural books. Students went on a hunt in our room for procedural texts and they found them in many of the books they had in their book boxes. We also brainstormed procedural writing topics. The students came up with so many things to write about!
We have done many activities in the past two weeks about procedural writing. Here are a few ideas:
1. Using The Explain Everything App To Produce a Procedural Video
One of the activities Mrs. Pelletier and I did with the students to show the purpose and how to model how to write a procedural text was a science experiment. We performed the experiment in front of the class and then the students and I wrote out the materials and steps we performed. Students took pictures of the steps and then imported the pictures into Explain Everything. Students then recorded their voices explaining the experiment. Here is the finished product.
2. Bubble Gum Fun!
The second Procedural writing activity was to have the students blow a bubble and then write the steps to blowing a bubble. If you are interested in doing this activity, you can download it for free here. Students were given a piece of Hubba Bubba to chew and then were asked to blow a bubble, thinking of the steps they performed while blowing the bubble. Students then wrote their procedure down, created a face that looked like them and blew a pink balloon up to insert where the mouth should be. The kids loved the lesson and the overall project turned out really cute!
3. Gingerbread Fun Using Explain Everything
In our third project, we read the Gingerbread Baby. Students were then given gingerbread cookies and a picture of a gingerbread man. Students were instructed to eat the gingerbread cookie and to take notes on the picture of the gingerbread man according to the order they ate the gingerbread man. Students then wrote their procedure for "How To Eat A Gingerbread Cookie" Tomorrow, the students who have completed the writing assignment will be given another gingerbread cookie to take pictures of it for their video. Then, the students will import the pictures into explain everything, explain their procedure using their writing assignment and post their final product on their blogs. (Using the Science Experiment video as a guide) I have taken a screenshot of the success criteria checklist I created for this particular project.
*As I am writing this post student's are still working on this project. I will update when they have completed their videos and have uploaded them to their blogs.
