Mrs. Phi told me today that in years past, the Third Grade had done this simple machines project by taking the pictures with the classroom cameras, importing them into their Home Folders in the computer lab, and then using Publisher to create a brochure. Now that they have the iPads, they can do the entire project on the iPads in their classrooms. According to Mrs. Phi, it is much more engaging. 

I got to see the students in action today as they were finishing up their projects and they were all so very excited to share them with me. They were most definitely engaged in their learning!

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 got to work with a few of Jennifer Wolff's first graders today using Keynote on their iPads. Though it was an activity grounded in curriculum, Jennifer's main intent was to familiarize the students with the app, so we didn't spend a lot of time talking about content. We kept it simple and the beauty of that is that the next time the students work with that app, the technology itself will be secondary and the focus will be on the content.