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Last week I posted several example ideas of how you can utilize Google Forms in the elementary classroom. I decided to go ahead and create an instructional video of how I went about making a form that includes a picture. This provides quite an opportunity for assessment as the students are able to view the text as well as complete the assessment all from one page. Once you are familiar with Google Forms, these assessments can be made between five to ten minutes.  This first grader was able to complete the task within five minutes. All the data was then sent directly to the teacher's Google Drive account.

I have provided a few professional development opportunities on Google Forms and the possibilities it holds for your classroom. I think the real key is that you start small and pick one area where you want to apply this tool. I've been brainstorming various ideas and I think by posting them here teachers can get a good feel of ways to get started. Feel free to input data yourself. In this example, I found a passage and took a picture of it online. I then uploaded the picture and added some multiple choice questions to the form. This example was actually used with a first grade classroom as of this morning on their iPod Touch. I sent it through email and most of the students were able to successfully click on the link, read the passage, and submit their answers independently. Loading... Here is one I came up with just to save time. It is just an attendance and lunch check and can be cleared out each day. This could be a part of their daily routine. The info is automatically ta...

I'm very excited for the potential that Snag-It  will provide for our PC users at Wayne Center and Rome City.  Techsmith provides some really good quality products for both the business realm as well as for education. My teachers will find this especially useful since many websites and resources restrict student access under the age of 13. Since this program runs directly on their laptops, this is not an issue. For those of you that are unfamiliar, Snag-it is a full featured photo editor, annotator, and screen-casting tool. The video portion would have to be edited by an outside resource, but Techsmith offers a good quality option through Camtasia . This week, I worked with Mrs. Ortiz's sixth graders to install the program and get students oriented with some of the basics. Students learned how to snag pictures from the internet, combine and edit pictures, and annotate them all from Snag-It. One of the skills that Mrs. Ortiz is currently covering is Personification. So I c...

Last week I posted about using Story by Disney  with second grade students to create an adjective book. This week I began using Story with Kindergarten students at Rome City Elementary . After taking a look at the Kindergarten scope and sequence chart for East Noble School Corporation, I saw that color words was being covered for this week. So to help support their learning and introduce this new app, all the students created a Story on their own iPod while I demonstrated on my iPad. To start the procedure, I sent the students images of foods the match the color words through email. (The students especially found the eggplant to be humorous for the color purple.) The students downloaded the images onto their iPod touch and we moved on to the Story app. I went through the first few steps to show them what to expect because Kindergarten kids tend to panic with their device if something is not familiar. By the time we were finished, they had imported all the pictures, added the text...

This week I have been working a lot with how apps like 30 Hands and Shadow Puppet can be utilized. Last week I worked with Mrs. Erexson's second graders to take a picture of a passage in their text and record it being read aloud. This task can be used with any fluency skill. After discussing it with Mrs. Erexson, she has had the students make use of 30 hands a few more times and her comment was that she likes that she is essentially able to check-in and monitor with students that she missed during class. It gives also gives the students a sense of accountability as they need to have evidence that they are completing the task of practicing fluency. This would be extremely difficult without an app like 30 Hands. I am providing an example, but want the view to keep in mind that this is the first time the student has ever used the application. We were more focused on getting accustomed to the app than the actual fluency skill. As the students get more familiar with the app, the foc...

I have had a really busy week getting classes rolling with new tech skills and thinking up possibilities for teachers. I was pondering how beneficial it would be for me to share out what I've been doing this week. I am hoping it will spark some ideas for teachers as they contemplate lesson planning in the next few weeks. This week in Mrs. Bollman's second grade class at Wayne Center Elementary we utilized Story by Disney on the iPad to create an adjective book. The students had never used Story before, but I was able to get the kids oriented with the app well enough that they were able to get started on a digital book. We worked together as a class on the first one and then I cut them loose and had them try it on their own. The activity included pictures that I sent to them through email, making a list of adjectives to describe the picture, and then a sentence using one of the adjectives. It turned out to be a fun little project. (As you can see, it can be embedded on a web...

I know Pic Collage is an application that I've probably overused, but it is such a great place to start due to the flexibility of the app. Yesterday I worked with Mrs. Bollman's class on Pic Collage because it is a great place for teachers to go when they need students to create a quick product or even a larger project. She gave me a list of skills that they have covered recently and needed to review. So I chose to discuss plural vs. possessive nouns. I collected a few pictures for the students and emailed them out instead of having theme use the web search feature built into Pic Collage. Mainly due to time constraints for the students and they needed images for both a plural and a possesive noun. The students saved the images from their email, inserted them into Pic Collage, and wrote a sentence using the noun as plural and possessive. Here are some examples of what was accomplished. We had a great time. 

I love working with primary grades. Everything is so exciting; everything is new. Today I worked with Kindergarten and first grade students at Rome City on different projects. We've made really good progress with using technology. Kindergarten has been working on using Pic Collage for several weeks. I've been meeting with them once a week to get them well oriented with the app and also sending their work through an email. (Still at this point, email is the best avenue for collecting work from iOS devices on the ENSC network.) Today I put together a slideshow with multiple pictures and set it on autoplay. As the slides rolled through, the students had to find the words that started with A. They used Pic Collage to take a picture of the items, place a letter A on the item, and typed their name on it. (I used beginning sounds because most of the majority of students are able to do this skill, but may need practice from time to time because I'm primarily focusing on them ...