Malchow's Tech Bytes 👩🏻‍💻~ November 9th

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👩🏻‍💻 Malchow's Tech Bytes~ October 21st!~ 🍁Fall / Halloween🎃 Edition

The weather is changing here in Wisconsin and the days are getting cooler! Yahoo!!! I love this time of year and the color changes that take place, especially the Sugar Maple trees! Absolutely stunning!

This week's Tech Bytes has several resources that you may find helpful as we venture into this new season. 

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Using Padlet in Science

Today we began a new science unit all about the study of organisms. We started by brainstorming a list of living and nonliving things. In an effort to make this more interactive and engaging for all students I set up a Padlet wall for the class to write their ideas on. For those not familiar with Padlet, it is the old WallWisher. It is a virtual bulletin board that allows people to post their thoughts on a common topic. You can add images, video, or text anywhere on the page from any device. 

By providing a virtual bulletin board, everyone had the opportunity to share their ideas without having to wait while one person shares and the teacher writes it on chart paper. In addition, students will now be able to share our Padlet wall with their parents as well as our Twitter followers. We are hoping that some of our Twitter followers will tweet us some additional items for our list.

Using Padlet was extremely easy (both the setup and the using) To access the wall I simply copied the provided QR code (yup, the site provides one automatically for you to copy) and pasted it onto our smartboard document. My kiddos simply scanned it with their QR readers (we use Inigma) and it took them right there. Once on the site, kids simply need to double tap the screen and then tap in the dialogue box to write their idea. When they're done they  tap anywhere on the screen and viola! their post appears. I pulled up the Padlet wall on the smartboard which the kids thought was beyond cool as they could see all of the new posts appear as they worked.

As I mentioned, this was a great way for all students to be actively involved in our learning today in addition to making the walls of our learning transparent for our parents and others.

Pushes and Pulls

We are currently studying forces and motion in science. As part of our unit, we study the difference between pushes and pulls. Today kiddos partnered up and took 3 pictures of each with their partners and then created a PicCollage with their examples.

Although it was a bit chaotic, the best part of this lesson was that each of my kiddos had to team up with a student from another class that had never used PicCollage before which meant that they not only had to show what they knew about pushes and pulls, but they had to use what they knew about PicCollage to teach a friend how to use the app as well. I have to say, I was very proud of how well my kiddos took on this task. :-)

Plant growth and iMovie

Oh how I wish I had remembered to save a copy of one of the finished products before I cleared off the iPads this summer. Grrrrr... 

One of our science units in first grade is organisms and as part of that unit we plant seeds and observe their growth. This year we added a bit of a tech twist that really turned out nicely. Every other day when the kids would come in they would get their plant, water it if needed, and then take a picture of it. If there were any substantial changes they would also write about it in their Plant log. At the end of this adventure, we used the iMovie app to document our plant's growth. We started by using Max Doodle to make the covers for our movies. Students came up with a title, added a background and drawing and of course their author information they then saved their image with a screenshot so they could import it into their iMovie. Next they imported their plant pictures.  This was a great way for kids to practice sequencing of events. They then checked their transitions and added music to their creations.
Their projects turned out well and they were very excited to see their plant's growth from start to finish in fast forward. 
This is a project I will definitely do again next year. We may use Haiku Deck next year instead for something different and not as time consuming but we'll see how next year's kiddos are.  

Plant growth and iDiary

I've mentioned the app, iDiary here before, but the more I use it the more I am liking it. It originally started out as being an app that the kiddos could use during their work on writing time of our our Daily 5 format, but has blossomed into so much more. I was very excited when one of my kiddos asked if she could use it to track the growth of her seed during our Organisms unit. This was a great way for her to journal and share her thoughts with her family as she would email her entry to her mom each day as well. I love the way kiddos can import pictures into their journal entry and even include captions for their pics. We will definitely be using this app in more curricular areas in the future.