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!

The first activity that EE First Graders did this year with their iPads involved a set of instructions designed specifically to teach them how to use the iPads's Camera and the Photo App. 

Before beginning the activity, students were reminded to ask permission before taking pictures of their friends, so that set the very business like tone of this iPad project. During the activity, students took a specific number of pictures, took a video, deleted a picture, made a photo album and named that album.

What a great way to start the year!

Today was the big day for Mrs. Wolff's four Scribble Press trainers that I met with last week as they took on the task of passing on their newly acquired knowledge of the Scribble Press app to their fellow table members. 

They started by showing their friends how to login to Mrs. Wolff's classroom account and start a blank book. Then they quickly moved on to the how to's of adding sentences and illustrations to their pages. It was so much fun to see these 4 slip so easily into teacher mode as they walked around their tables offering pointers and advice and answering questions that arose. Mrs. Wolff did a great job of mentoring her 4 trainers and encouraging their efforts. By the end of the hour, most of the students had completed 4 of their 8 pages!

I think that Mrs. Wolff would agree with me that this was a highly successful experiment - well worth trying again. 

Thanks to Margie Brown for the fun stop motion video that she made of her visit to Jennifer's class!

Our first graders are getting so proficient on their iPads that they are now able to use multiple apps within one project! Recently Jennifer Wolffe had her students use Draw Free to draw a picture of a chick. They saved their picture in the Camera Roll and opened Pages. In Pages, they typed 3 sentences about chicks, changed the font size and type and then emailed the pictures to their teacher. WOW! That is impressive! Imagine what these First Graders will be able to do once they reach the Second Grade!

When campuses first began having access to shared iPads, I started using this model with Sandy Crump's class. The two of us thought that this approach to teaching a new app made the most sense in a room with only 4 or 5 iPads. So, I would teach a small group of students how to use the app and then Sandy would call another small group of students to the table and the student trainers would teach the new students while Sandy and I looked on. 

So, today I got to try that model with Mrs. Wolff's First Graders. Though she has an iPad for each of her students, Mrs. Wolff thought it would be interesting to see how her students fared with this approach to teaching and learning. 

I worked for about 45 minutes with 4 student trainers showing them how to use Scribble Press, an app that allows you to create your own books and share them with your class, your parents and/or the world! I developed a First Grade friendly step set for the boys to use today in hopes that that step set would be helpful to them when it was their turn to be the teacher. 

For the next few days, the students will work on completing their animal research. When that goal has been accomplished, the boys will try their hand at teaching. I will keep you posted on the results!

My good friend and co-worker, Marianna Husain, found this idea on Matt Gomez's blog. She emailed me and asked if I thought that I had a Kinder teacher who might be interested. I asked around and Ms. Champion was willing to give it a try. We spent time up front talking to the students about the intentions of the activity: to practice developing strategies, to be good sports  and to HAVE FUN! Marianna and I familiarized ourselves with Google Hangout with the help of our fellow Ed Techs. And then we were ready for the real thing. So, this morning, we played our first three games with Ms. King's Kindergarten class from BPE. We started by opening a hangout. Then we opened the google doc that Matt developed and allowed us to copy that contained the Tic Tac Toe board and we were off! 

Though BPE won 2 games and we tied one, as Marianna said in her blog, "everyone in kindergarten was a winner today"!

Please contact me if your school would like to play!

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. 

Today I had the opportunity to watch Jennifer Wolfe teach her First Graders how to use an app called TurboCollage. This was a wonderful experience for a couple of reasons. One is that I had never used this app so I learned something that I could share with teachers. The second reason was that I got to see some wonderful teaching. It was evident that Jennifer had done her homework. She knew the app backwards and forwards and she had put a lot of thought into exactly how to pace the instruction to fit the needs of her students. The students were engaged and on task the entire time. Jennifer is an expert in the field of classroom management and it is an amazing thing to watch. 

What she was asking them to do was not all that simple. Earlier in the week, the class had used their iPads to take pictures of shapes around the campus. They imported the pictures into TurboCollage, chose a border for them, moved them all into place, used the text tool to write the name of each shape, and then titled their work and saved it to the Camera Roll. And the results were precious!  

Mrs. Wolff's students created planets using coffee filters, markers and water and then they wrote about their planets. Using Screen Chomp, they took a picture of their planets and then recorded their planet descriptions. ScreenChomp generated a URL for each student's presentation and Mrs. Wolff took all of the URLs and put them into a Keynote presentation that she shared with her students and a few special guests.