A couple of weeks ago, Haley Bromlow emailed me to ask about setting up blogs for her students. I was thrilled as I had been wanting to try using the Weebly app on the student iPad as a means of providing a safe place for students to house their writing. After conferring with Janet Couvillion, who I knew had had great success with this at Forest Trail, I launched into the set up process which is definitely the most time consuming  piece of the puzzle. 

Here are the steps we took to get started:                                                                                                      

Let me know if you are interested in setting up classroom blogs for you students. I would be happy to help!

While looking for a campus using Nearpod in their classrooms that we could observe for the purpose of planning our next TechTuesday, Kelly and I stumbled upon something quite amazing happening. It seems that the RTI teachers at Valley View were looking for a meaningful way to support their 3rd and 4th Grade students in Math. Enter the creative genius of Lorrie Salome. Lorrie dreamed up a plan that she hoped would engage all students while at the same time finding the students that were struggling and the concepts that they were struggling with and offering those students the support that they needed. Here is how it works.

Lorrie created a character - a French detective named Pierre and his poodle side kick - who spend their days traveling around the campus looking for Math problems to solve. The RTI team creates a story problem using Pierre as a focus and Lorrie uses Photoshop to create the needed pictures and then drops them into Nearpod. Then the team with the added bonus of the wonderful Margie Brown take the final product into classrooms and push their Nearpod slides out to the student iPads. 

In the presentation that we saw, Lorrie had VVE's Coach Sanderson as the main character. You can see the results in the slides below. The students loved every minute of it. The iPad component of the project was accompanied by a paper and pencil activity on which students were encouraged to do their best work so that they could have a chance at being selected as the next student in the adventures of Pierre. 

Results of the Nearpod portion of the project were compiled immediately and what happens next is really the best part of this story. Lorrie uses Thinglink to create a document with links to activities that will serve as intervention tools for those students who had struggled with the concept and activities that would challenge those who had had no difficulties with it. The RTI team takes these Thinglinks back into the classrooms, they pull the students who they need to work with and they get down to business. 

It is a great example of strong collaboration between people with a single vision - the definition of a great PLC. If you and your team would like to see it in action, please let Kelly and me know. It would be a great use of your PLC time and we would be happy to set it up for you!

Last week, Elizabeth Hudgins invited the leadership team into her classroom to see her 5th Graders working their way through an assortment of Math centers. It was a delightful experience from start to finish. The students were engaged, the conversations were magical and the room was a beehive of activity. There were 5 centers, each one offering a unique challenge and lots of opportunities for collaboration and problem solving. Thanks for sharing your class with us, Elizabeth, and thanks for all of the hard work that you put into making this happen for your students. 

Third Grade definitely has the right idea about how to maximize student learning with the iPads. One class learns a skill and that class teaches their peers. 

In this case, Laura Wright's class taught Dianne Watts' class how to make a Math photo album in the photo app. Photo albums come in handy when you want to group photos for easy access. 

We now have 2 classes who are experts in this subject, so If you want your students to know how to do this, you can contact these two teachers or, of course, you can contact me!

Aurasma is an augmented reality platform and is an app on all of the student iPads. Aurasma uses advanced image and pattern recognition to blend the real world with rich interactive content. Laura Wright's class used this app this work as a culminating activity for a Science Unit on Landforms. 

The landforms were created and labeled and each of them contained a volcano. Part of today's activity was to watch as the 3rd Grade Scientists added the correct ingredients to make their volcanoes erupt.