I recently ran across an app that students can use to practice writing sentences. Plus the app can be used a variety of other ways if you think outside the box. For instance Write Draw can be used in math. The first student would create a math problem. The second student would solve the problem and the next student could solve the problem a different way. Students could use the app for a "How To" collaborative writing assignment. The first student would write the first step. The second student would draw it out. Then the next student would write out the next step, etc. Or a student could hold on to the iPad for two turns so that they are writing and drawing each turn. I used this app with 2nd and 3rd graders so far. It is probably appropriate for 1st-5th.
For the introductory activity I gave students a quick walk through of how to use the app and showed them an example. Then I had all students get their iPads and sit in a large circle around the entire classroom so that they will not see each other's iPads. Next students went into the app and wrote a silly sentence. After each turn students would 1. Click send 2. Type their name 3. Click pass 4. Put their iPad onto the floor as a cue to me that they were ready to pass their iPads to the left. We passed iPads for around 7 turns and then used the rest of the class time to share via the classroom Apple TV and projector.
A quick video of students working and two student examples:
As of today, teachers can get a free Mystery Science account. There are many many reasons to love this tool for teaching science in your elementary classroom. First off, all lessons are aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards, at the moment that is what our school district is aligning our science curriculum with. Then, of course, there is the fact that the lesson is all prepared for the classroom teacher. The only thing that the teacher needs to do is collect the supplies and guide students through the presentation created by the folks at Mystery Science. Lastly, THE STUDENTS LOVE THE LESSONS! The lessons are interactive and extremely engaging. Video of four third grade classes participating in a Mystery.
Videos of a fifth grade classes participating in a Mystery.
Here is what Mystery Science explains as their mission...
Overview of Mystery Science
At Mystery Science, we think the overall purpose of science education is the same as all the other subjects: to prepare children to thrive as adults--to prepare them to achieve their values and be happy in the world. But science class has a unique contribution to this goal. It’s in science class that children acquire the proper habits of thinking and problem-solving. And they do this while learning lots of useful knowledge about the physical world around them. Mystery Science is unique from other science curricula both in what is taught and in how it is taught. We promise that even you, the teachers, will be astounded by what you learn during the course of teaching a Mystery to their students. Every scientific conclusion began as a mystery in the world—someone was surprised by something they experienced and they set out to discover the cause behind it. So every Mystery Science lesson begins by presenting students with a mystery. Students are guided to make observations and connections between what they’re observing to help them resolve the mystery. The scientific conclusion is the climax of this investigation—the solution to the mystery. Mystery Science meets and exceeds the new Next Generation Science Standards. In addition, it incorporates the latest research about how to address and uproot students’ natural misconceptions about the world. And most important of all, every lesson meets our own MS Motivational Standards (MSMS).
It is always fun and engaging to use iPads to have students create videos of their work, but it is even more fun when a project can be inspired by a holiday like Christmas. Then share projects with students' parents via email or posted on a teacher's blog/website. Parents love to see and hear their children. This project is a great way to capture a moment in time.
For this project, see examples below, students typed out the Christmas poem they created in Google Docs. Then they copied the text of their poem and pasted the text in Phoetic, a word cloud creating app, to generate a word cloud. Lastly students created an Adobe Voice of their poetry using images through Adobe Voice and their Phoetic word cloud.
In my last blog post I wrote about using Adobe Voice in the classroom and today I am writing about using the sister App, Adobe Slate. This app could be used for a variety of projects like explaining a topic, "how to" tutorial, sharing knowledge of a standard including photos of evidence, word work, and anything else that can be shared with photos and text.
Here is the App Store description...
Description
Named App Store Editors’ Choice, Slate lets you turn your next newsletter, report, invitation or travel adventure into a gorgeous visual story that delights readers on any device. Simply tap to select a unique look — beautiful fonts, color and magazine-style design are automatically incorporated. Fluid movement and elegant motion are applied instantly. Share your Slate story link anywhere. Grab attention, increase awareness and inspire action. Stand out.
I suggest creating one teacher account for all students to use in the elementary level because creating an account requires an email address. It is a good idea to use a student friendly password so that the students can log in.
Below is one that I created to share with my students. You can embed your own projects... and here is a link to a 2nd grade student Adobe Slate. https://slate.adobe.com/cp/VcoEa/
Classroom teachers and students have another wonderful iOS app at their disposal! I love, love, love this app!!! Adobe Voice is very intuitive for students and teachers to navigate. Plus the finished projects are enjoyable to watch. Students can save the video to their camera roll or email a link to the video which is stored on Adobe's site.
Suggested uses:
1. Fluency
2. Tell a story
3. Tutorial
4. Share knowledge
5. Explain understanding of a standard
How To Video created with the help of some of my students.
As you all know, K/1 teachers do not have iPads yet. However, you can still purchase free Apps to have in your account for later use by you and your students. Plus this is good to know if you want to purchase apps from your laptop if your iPad is not handy.
1. Log into your iTunes Account on your laptop using your assigned Apple ID. (Your ID should be "YourSchool"ipad"#"@bonnyeagle.org ) There would be no spaces nor capital letters. Example = ednaipad5@bonnyeagle.org If you do not know your assigned iPad number, please shoot me an email. I have access to the list.
2. Search for the app that you would like in the iTunes Store.
3. Purchase the app by clicking where is says "Get". After you have done this step, the app will show up in the "purchased" section of the App Store on all devices that are logged into your Apple ID.
It is that time of year again to organize your classroom so that it can be cleaned over the summer. Cleaning staff does not clean your school supplies and tools and the same applies to the technology in your classroom. I have compiled a check list of things that you will want to do so that your iPads will survive the summer of non-use and how you and/or your students may want to go about cleaning your technology devices.
1. Charge your iPads to between 50% and 70% and then unplug them from the chargers. You will need to give your iPads a complete charge when you return in August. This will insure that your iPads batteries will not be damaged.
2. Shut down your iPads.
3. If you would like to clean the iPads, use a microfiber cloth for the screen and soap & water on the cases or Clorox Disinfectant Wipes for the cases.
4. Place all iPads in your storage cabinet.
5. Make sure your projector is turned off and not just in sleep mode.
6. Put your document camera (Elmo) somewhere safe where it will not get knocked around or damaged.
7. Unplug your sound system and store the box along with all of the wires somewhere safe so that they do not get lost in the shuffle.
Our district will have some beneficial technology changes for elementary classroom teachers and their students next year.
For starters, all of the elementary teachers will be receiving a brand new, right out of the box, laptop this summer (MacBook Air). What that means for elementary classroom teachers... back up all of your files onto an external hard drive or into Google Drive before you trade your old laptop in. If you have taken advantage of Google Apps for Education, you will have all of those documents available to you as soon as you log into your Google account. Another benefit with Google is your bookmarks will be saved. Make sure to sign into Chrome by clicking the little person in the upper right hand corner of the browser and choose to link data. Then no matter what computer you sign into Chrome with, you will have all of your bookmarks available. If you use Firefox or Safari click the links to learn how to save your bookmarks. When I received my laptop this winter, I did not restore it using Time Machine, but rather only uploaded files on my computer that I need to use. The rest of my older files stayed on external hard drives and flash drives. The less you have stored on your computer, the more efficiently it will run. A great article on using an external hard drive to store documents and applications. With your new MacBook Air, you will have an SD slot. This is another way to store files and keep your Mac running faster without having to carry around a hard drive or a flash drive. Cards are made to fit nicely into the laptop without sticking out like flash drives. See photos below.
How to back up documents to an external hard drive.
How to back up documents to Google Drive.
Your new laptop will come with a variety of advantages, one being that the Airs can work wirelessly with a classroom Apple TV. This means less wires to plug in and the convenience of projecting your laptop and the sound from your laptop from anywhere in your classroom. We are very fortunate to be getting faster and better laptops plus not hand-me-downs from the MLTI buy back program. However, this exchange does come with one thing that we will need to work on. For those teachers that play DVDs from your laptop, we will need to come up with a different solution. For teachers who have purchased videos from iTunes, you can play those from your Apple TV. Also if you have a Netflix account you can sign in to your account on your Apple TV and project videos, but if you do not have either option available, you may want to think about teaming up with some teachers to purchase a device that will play DVDs for you.
The plan is to be 1-1 with iPads in grades 2-5 for the 2015-2016 school year. There will also be changes with the way you get apps for your classroom iPads. All app purchases, free or paid, will need to go through Ryan via the tech help ticket system. Choose app request from the drop down menu. Ryan will push the apps to the classroom iPads fairly quickly. Classroom teachers will also have one extra iPad for teacher use. This iPad will not have to have apps downloaded through Ryan. You can use your own Apple ID to purchase apps, test apps out, and decide if the apps are worth adding to your classroom iPads. The downside to teachers having their own iPad is, the iPad carts will no longer be available. Who this will effect... K-1 classroom teachers who have religiously signed out and used the iPad carts. During the next school year, K-1 teachers will have a teacher iPad and a couple more iPads will be added to their already existing set of 5 iPads. I know many of my K-1 teachers have grown accustomed to using the cart so that they can have a class set of iPads. Unfortunately this will be an adjustment to those classroom teachers. What I hope to see is teachers teaming up and sharing iPads for the times when a full class set is needed. Every classroom that has iPads right now will be keeping what they have and for grades 2-5 will be supplemented with the latest iPads to create a class set, except if you teach 3rd grade. In 3rd grade the mini iPads will be removed and you will receive the regular size iPads, probably a mix of iPad 2s and the newest model. I imagine, but don't know the logistics, this will probably mean that K-1 teachers will have minis instead of iPad 2s or quite possibly a mix of the two sizes. K-1 classrooms may or may not have to trade in their iPad 2s for mini iPads. This also means that you will have some old iPads with 16G of storage and new iPads with 64G of storage. You may want to keep this in mind when choosing who in your classrooms will have which iPads. Also, your storage cabinet has 20 charging slots. If you have a larger than 20 student class next year, you will want to have a solution in place for charging the extra iPads that will be sitting on the bottom shelf inside your iPad cabinet.
If you have any questions, feel free to email me. As with any plan, there will be things that we need to work on together. I look forward to helping grades 2-5 move forward with a 1-1 implementation and helping K-1 figure out next steps and how you can make the most of the devices that will be available to you.
What a great opportunity to meet students from another country! We have been blessed to sail two iBoats in the Atlantic Ocean. An iBoat is a small unmanned boat that has a GPS tracker attached to it. Our first boat circled around in what is called, "The Garbage Patch" for many months and is still sailing around. The second boat we sailed left shore October 2013. Fishermen off the coast of Cape Cod dropped it in the ocean for us and 11 months later (November 14, 2014) it landed in Quilmes Carnota (La Coruna), Spain. The nice gentleman who discovered the boat, brought it to the local school. Documents attached to the boat asked that whoever finds the boat to find a local school to bring the boat to. That is when a friendship was born. My contact information was also on the boat and the headmaster of the school got in touch with me. We have had two Skype visits so far and we plan to meet again. Videos of our meetings below.
We plan to meet one more time. My students are learning a couple songs in Spanish, we have a students band that will play, and we will share some information about our community.
If you would like more information about the iBoat program, visit Educational Passages.
For the introductory activity I gave students a quick walk through of how to use the app and showed them an example. Then I had all students get their iPads and sit in a large circle around the entire classroom so that they will not see each other's iPads. Next students went into the app and wrote a silly sentence. After each turn students would 1. Click send 2. Type their name 3. Click pass 4. Put their iPad onto the floor as a cue to me that they were ready to pass their iPads to the left. We passed iPads for around 7 turns and then used the rest of the class time to share via the classroom Apple TV and projector.
