Erin Krieger is bravely diving into the use of a relatively new software, iBooks Author (the one that Laura Wright's class used to create their Pioneer Books) in her 5th Grade class. 

The students researched a particular decade and are using Pages on their iPads to record their research findings and store the images for their project. Once they have completed that process, they can begin to copy it all over to iBooks and begin the process of creating their book. 

Today I had the opportunity to watch Jennifer Wolfe teach her First Graders how to use an app called TurboCollage. This was a wonderful experience for a couple of reasons. One is that I had never used this app so I learned something that I could share with teachers. The second reason was that I got to see some wonderful teaching. It was evident that Jennifer had done her homework. She knew the app backwards and forwards and she had put a lot of thought into exactly how to pace the instruction to fit the needs of her students. The students were engaged and on task the entire time. Jennifer is an expert in the field of classroom management and it is an amazing thing to watch. 

What she was asking them to do was not all that simple. Earlier in the week, the class had used their iPads to take pictures of shapes around the campus. They imported the pictures into TurboCollage, chose a border for them, moved them all into place, used the text tool to write the name of each shape, and then titled their work and saved it to the Camera Roll. And the results were precious!  

Carin Champion had the thought that perhaps her students might be able to get their ideas down on paper faster if they used the iPads to type out their thoughts without the added pressure of worrying about how to form each letter. So, she had them open Pages, type their sentences and then copy their sentences onto a piece of paper from the iPad. Not only did some of the students find that getting their ideas into written form was easier this way, but an impressive number of skills were learned by all in the process. 

Mrs. Wolff's students created planets using coffee filters, markers and water and then they wrote about their planets. Using Screen Chomp, they took a picture of their planets and then recorded their planet descriptions. ScreenChomp generated a URL for each student's presentation and Mrs. Wolff took all of the URLs and put them into a Keynote presentation that she shared with her students and a few special guests.