Today, we had some visitors to our campus from the land down under. Thanks to Lisa Johnson and Tim Yenca for orchestrating this visit and to Lance Matus, Jennifer Wolff and Laura Wright for allowing us to spend time in their classrooms with these special visitors. 

This all started when an Australian Apple Rep contacted a U.S. Apple Rep about a group of Australian principals who wanted to see iPad integration in action. This contact culminated in our visit today and it couldn't have been more pleasant for all involved.

We started in Laura Wright's room where the students were using Legos to create a structure. Next they used some special graph paper to help them calculate the perimeter and area of the structure, and then they created  an iMovie of the steps involved in the process. 

We moved on from there to Jennifer Wolff's class where her First Graders had taken photos of objects that demonstrated the concept of "push" and "pull" and compiled those pictures in the Pic Collage app. Once in the app, the students used the text tool to label each picture and then they saved the collage in the Camera Roll. 

Last, but not least, we went to Mr. Matus's Fifth Grade Science class where Lance had his students taking pictures of examples of refraction and reflection and labeling those. 

Here are a few pictures from today's event. Thanks to all who made it happen!

I love this creative use of Gmail that Laura Wright told me about today. Here are the details:

#1. The class spent about 30 minutes adding their parent emails into the "contacts" on the iPad, and adding Laura as well.  Those are the only people in their contacts. 

#2 Everyone puts in "mom" as the first name of their mom and "dad" as the first name of their dad, and Laura's first nam is "Miss". This makes it easier for students to autofill their parents's names when sending an email.

#3 Laura is "CC'd" on every email that goes out.

#4 Students cannot hit "send" without Laura's permission. They use their paper dictionaries and ask Laura to help with spelling, so editing is an important part of this process. 

#5 The class checks email everyday quickly at a certain time.  They usually don't respond, unless it is a special project. For example, she has her students send reminders to their parents before a field trip so parents don't need to respond to them.

#6 They use this as a writing grade.  They read something, such as Time For Kids, and take a photo of something in the article and email it out.  They have to write 3-4 sentences about it what they have read.   

#7 Laura prints out the email and grades it for spelling, grammar and punctuation!

#8 Parents respond and the best part of all of this is the questions that the parents are asking their student about his/her writing and the answers that those questions evoke in her students. 

Not only do these activities promote good writing, but they are a great means of parent/teacher/student communication. 

Thanks for sharing, Laura!