We were fortunate enough to once again have visiting educators from around the state on our campus this May. Folks who attend the iLeap Academy are here because they have just launched an iPad initiative or are considering doing so. They spend 3 days in Austin, most of which are in a classroom setting led by Carl Hooker, Tim Yenca and Lisa Johnson. For 2 hours each day, attendees visit campuses across the district where they get a chance to see iPad integration in action. Here is the schedule we followed:

Our visitors saw a wide variety of activities. In Elisse Newey's room, we observed the 4th Graders making Stop Motion Videos. In Maci Shannon's room we saw a variety of apps being used for Formative Assessment: including Plickers, Nearpod, and Notability. We spent awhile Monday in Carin Champion's Kinder class visiting with students about projects that they had created with their iPads this year. On Tuesday, we talked to Mary Ann Simmons's students about the work they were doing in Google Classroom. Wednesday Second Graders let us observe and ask questions about a Mother's Day project they were doing using one of the following apps: Pages, Popplet, or Book Creator. 

As I told Tim afterwards, the highlight of these visits for me is that the amazing teachers on our campus have a chance to shine and shine they do! I couldn't have been prouder of and more grateful to the 5 teachers that opened up their classrooms to us. 

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!

Natalie Brewer's Fourth Graders learned about the tools that scientists use last week and finished off the lesson by using the Trading Card iPad app to make trading cards that focused on one of the tools. 

Natalie started by emailing photos of 3 tools to each student. Students saved the photos to their camera roll. They chose one picture, opened it in the app and began entering info about the tool on the trading card that they selected. I think the thing that I like most about the app is that it asks guiding questions to help the students decide what they want to include on their cards. 

The final products could be emailed and/or saved to the camera roll. 

Elisse Newey came to me with an issue that hasn't cropped up yet in many classrooms on this campus, but one which I think many of us will run across often in the near future. It seems that so much of the workflow in her classroom is now done on the iPad or using a web based resource that she had no papers going out in the Thursday folders. Her concern was that, though she loved her new, paperless system, she still needed a way to share student work and the rubrics she used to grade that work with parents. So, she needed to find a secure place for all of that to reside AND to be shared with parents. 

We looked at Weebly, but it wasn't quite secure enough, so Janet Couvillion, the wonderful Ed Tech at FTE, suggested that we try Three Ring. Three Ring is web based, but they also have an app. Elisse dove into this project and here are some of the things that she discovered:

1. She could add all of her students and then Three Ring would issue each student a unique code for login purposes.
2. She could tie those student accounts to a parent email thereby giving the parent access to just his/her student's information.
3. She could tag uploaded student work (see pictures below) with the name of the assignment and then use those tags to locate all student work with that tag. 
4. She could use that same tagging system to tag pictures of an event to share with parents. For example, she could tag Sam in all of the pictures of Mustang Mania and when his parents log in they will see all of Sam's pics from that event.  

Thanks to Elisse for all of her hard work on this project! 

Mrs. Didlake's class rounded out their unit on the Civil War by developing Keynote presentations. Students could choose from 10 different Civil War topics such as Medicines of the Civil War, Music of the Civil War, and Sharecropping. They worked in pairs: one iPad was for research and one was for compiling the presentation. Not only did the students learn lots about the Civil War, they also learned some lessons about Keynote....some of them painful! For instance, Keynote is unlike PowerPoint in that you can't easily change the background color of a slide, so it is best to pay attention to the themes when you create your presentations. Not a fun thing to realize when your project is almost complete, but I think that the fact that they discThanks for sharing your work with me, Mrs. Didlake! 

I loved the process that brought this class to this particular culminating activity. 

It all began in their literature circles. One student in each of the circles was designated the Illustrator and his/her responsibility was to draw a picture of the assigned reading. At the end of the novel study, each book circle assessed its pictures and decided what pictures were needed to complete the story. The missing pictures were drawn and the students completed storyboards that helped them plan the Strip Designer project that they would be doing with me today. All of that prep work made for an easy lesson on my part. I gave a 5 minute overview and they dove in. When it was all said and done, I walked out the door having learned 3 things from the students about the app that I didn't know before today. I love it when that happens and so do they!!!