Recently, Jennifer's students expanded their horizons and after learning how to use Puppet Pals themselves, they shared their new knowledge with Mrs. David's class. What a great way to build confidence in our student trainers and increase student engagement in both classes!
In the Fall, I wrote a blog post about Jennifer Wolff using the Train the Trainers method of instruction to teach students how to use a particular app. Recently, Jennifer's students expanded their horizons and after learning how to use Puppet Pals themselves, they shared their new knowledge with Mrs. David's class. What a great way to build confidence in our student trainers and increase student engagement in both classes!
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Third grade teachers spent a fun and festive week playing Holiday Minute to Win It! games to practice skills in measurement and graphing. In the “Face the Cookie” challenge, students had to get a gingerbread cookie from their forehead to their mouth without using their hands. They timed each other and then created bar graphs to display their data using the Numbers app on their iPads. Other games included the “Reindeer Nose Dive,” “Do You Hear What I Hear,” and “Holiday Card Cliffhanger.” What a fun way to practice math skills and practice working together in the classroom! Several weeks ago, Nicole David sent me an email with a link to the information for The Hour of Code, an event scheduled in conjunction with Computer Science Education Week, December 9-15. Educators were encouraged to sign their students up to participate for one hour that week by accessing a website containing motivational videos and grade level appropriate coding activities. The purpose of this event was, according to the website, that the event be "the first step on a journey to learn more about how technology works and how to create software applications". I have to admit that I was dubious at first. First Graders coding? How could that work? However, Nicole had done ALL of the background work and in no time at all, we were both on board and eagerly awaiting the experience of spending an hour with a room full of First Graders learning to code on an iPad. Today was our day and it was an amazing amount of fun. We "Chirped" out the website to the students, Nicole walked them through the first round of the coding activity (Angry Birds!) that she had chosen for them and they were off! Thanks so much, Nicole, for bringing this event to my attention and for letting me be a part of it! Mrs. Simmons's and Mrs. Harrison's classes learned about fables before the Thanksgiving holiday. The activity began with the reading of the fable which the teachers put into eBackpack. Once the story was read, the students filled out a story map and determined what the moral of their fable was. They then used Puppet Pals to create a story of their own making with the same moral as the story that they had read. Two of our 5th Graders came to my office today to give me a brief overview of the process. 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! Shannon Lojo's class took some time out to think about their future last week. Shannon challenged them to decide what they wanted to be when they grew up. Knowing how frequently that goal changes when you are in the Second Grade, she had them date their work. Brilliant. Tech Forum is something that I look forward to every year. Tech Forum is, according to their website's description, "a high powered, one-day event" which "provides K-12 decision makers with thought-provoking content on the hottest topics of the day in education technology". I love the size of the event and the fact that it offers no concrete answers, just lots of food for thought. This year, EE tried a new approach to our choice of conferences to attend. In the past, this campus has sent representatives to just one conference: TCEA. Last year, interest in that conference waned, so we decided that it might be time to branch out and try another conference. I chose this one for us because it offers not just a unique learning experience, but lots of opportunities to network with educational technology advocates from all over Central Texas. I emailed the offer out on a Saturday and in no time, I had 5 willing participants. This year's event took place today at the Airport Hilton and I have to say that I enjoyed it as much or more than any of the previous Tech Forums that I have attended. The presentations were thought provoking and the company was delightful. I haven't had time to check with the other EE reps yet, but from my point of view, it was a day well spent. Here is a brief summary.
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! |
Debbie Smith
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