It never ceases to amaze me what even the youngest learners are capable of with a little bit of guidance. Being a 1:1 iPad room my students are in a unique environment in which we embed technology in many different ways on a daily basis. When I first started out, our iPads were used more for games which extended or reinforced skills that we were working on in our classroom. We still use some of those apps, but more often than not, we use creation based apps now to SHOW what we know.
This past week one of my students and I were talking about penguins during her reading group time with me and came across a fact about penguin feathers being oily. I asked her if she knew why the oiliness of the feather was important. She has some ideas but was not sure. I wrote a note to her mom and asked if they could do a little water and oil experiment at home over the weekend to help her with this concept. Well, on Sunday afternoon, I received an email from this student with a picture of her experiment done in Skitch along with her conclusion. I was totally floored!!! The fact my kiddos use technology in our classroom is great, but when a child takes that same technology and thinks to use it at home to share what they've learned is priceless!
On that same afternoon I also received a video from another student in my class. On Friday we had chatted a bit about 3D printers. Our LMS brought in a gnome that her daughter had made at her school on a 3D printer and the kids were absolutely floored by the fact that a printer could make such a thing. Well as it turns out, this child went to a local technology store and saw a 3D printer in action. His mom said he went nuts and used her phone to video the printer for the class and also showed us some of the projects that it had made. On Monday used Air Server to show the video to the whole class and this child again got to share in his excitement! What a great learning moment for all and teaching moment for him!!
Did I mention that I teach 1st grade? Amazing right?! Who says 1st graders aren't invested in their learning! Rock on guys! You never cease to amaze me!!!!
We have been wrapping our unit on informational writing this week by studying penguins. Kiddos spent some time working with a partner to read the National Geographic eBook, Penguins. While they were reading they took notes on interesting facts. We then used these notes to create an informational paragraph about penguins.
We are now using our paragraphs to create a digital version of our research. As I mentioned earlier in the week, we used Popplet to web what we knew about penguins. Today, we again used the Pics4Learning site for copyright-free images of penguins- you can read more about this site here. We then imported our images into an app called, Skitch where students then labeled various features of penguins. These diagrams, along with our Popplets, will be inserted into our Doodlecast stories.
Skitch was very easy to use and students were able to independently use this app after just a brief introduction. The whole process of showing the app, discussing appropriate image selection (things such as image quality and size), finding and importing our images and then labeling took most 30 minutes. This was the 1st time we have used Skitch so I was happy with that time frame. I've found that with most apps, by the time we use them for the 3rd time, kiddos are flying through independently.
