Last week, Elizabeth Hudgins invited the leadership team into her classroom to see her 5th Graders working their way through an assortment of Math centers. It was a delightful experience from start to finish. The students were engaged, the conversations were magical and the room was a beehive of activity. There were 5 centers, each one offering a unique challenge and lots of opportunities for collaboration and problem solving. Thanks for sharing your class with us, Elizabeth, and thanks for all of the hard work that you put into making this happen for your students.
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Third Grade definitely has the right idea about how to maximize student learning with the iPads. One class learns a skill and that class teaches their peers. In this case, Laura Wright's class taught Dianne Watts' class how to make a Math photo album in the photo app. Photo albums come in handy when you want to group photos for easy access. We now have 2 classes who are experts in this subject, so If you want your students to know how to do this, you can contact these two teachers or, of course, you can contact me! Alison Grossimon's lesson on the 3 types of questions was well thought out and so very engaging from start to finish.
Finally, it was time to dive into Puppet Pals. The slideshow below shows the students in action. Here are two examples of the great student projects created.
This week's hAPPy Friday app is Bookabi. Bookabi is an app that lets children of all ages write and illustrate stories. Check out the App Integration Snapshot that I created for this app. Included in this snapshot, you will find links to a video tutorial and to a List.ly list of Bookabi resources that I have accumulated for you. As always, I would love to help you integrate this app into your classroom curriculum. Just say the word and I am there! :) Aurasma is an augmented reality platform and is an app on all of the student iPads. Aurasma uses advanced image and pattern recognition to blend the real world with rich interactive content. Laura Wright's class used this app this work as a culminating activity for a Science Unit on Landforms. The landforms were created and labeled and each of them contained a volcano. Part of today's activity was to watch as the 3rd Grade Scientists added the correct ingredients to make their volcanoes erupt.
Here is a List.ly of some great Aurasma resources: Augmented Reality View more lists from Debbie Smith 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. Yesterday was the first meeting of a group of teachers on our campus who are interested in learning to use iBooks Author to create and publish interactive books for the iPad. We will be meeting monthly throughout the year and the group will be led by Laura Wright who created and published her first book(The Life of an Eanes Pioneer Child) with her Third Graders last year and is currently working on her second publication. The goal for each of our participants is to publish a book by the end of the year. The books will stem from the curriculum of each teacher's grade level and will be a compilation of contributions from both students and teachers. Each month's meeting will focus on one of the aspects of creating a book and the time between meetings will be spent exploring that aspect and collecting student work. During our first meeting, Laura helped them set up two iBook files: a sandbox file for them to practice creating the various parts of their final product and the file for the final product itself. The teachers left with instructions to explore their sandbox file before our next meeting. This is a pilot program in this district and I will be using this blog to chronicle the progress that is made throughout the year. Check out this List.ly list of resources for iBook creation. The faculty and staff at Eanes have spent this week going about the business of teaching and learning while at the same time focusing on holding the Ryan family in our hearts and minds constantly - trying to hold them up from a distance as best we can. Today we gathered in the library for our monthly faculty meeting and were guided by our wonderful art teacher, Erin Mcelroy, in making origami swans to help decorate the REXSTRONG hospital room. Suffice to say that each of those swans - the perfect ones and the not so perfect ones - is a gift of love to Rex and to his family. I am always looking for appropriate ways to use Twitter in the classroom. This year, Jennifer Wolff seems to have found one of her own creation and I had a chance to see it in action last week. Natalie Brewer found a great rubric on one of her favorite resources: Digital Divide and Conquer, an excellent teacher blog. Here is what she did with it. She handed out the rubrics, assigned each student an app, and gave them a set amount of time to explore that app and complete the rubric. What a great way for students to learn all about the new apps on their iPads and share that info with their peers. I think this would be an excellent way to launch an exciting year of iPad integration! Thanks for sharing, Natalie!
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Debbie Smith
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