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Ms. Ruse and Ms. Doyle of Rome City got their class into the holiday spirit by having their first graders at Rome City Elementary  create poems. Last week I setup accounts on Pic Collage for both teachers, logged each iPod into the accounts, and downloaded all the holiday themed backgrounds and stickers that were available for free this month.  (I will explain the advantages of creating a class account in the near future.) This week we took the poems they created in Pic Collage, and imported them into Shadow Puppet. ( Shadow Puppet also has advantages to creating class accounts .) Each student not only titled their Shadow Puppet by their first name, but they also included a "selfie." This helped them quickly identify their work if they happened to forget to include their name in the title. (It also helps the teacher find it on their device.) This is a great way to share writing and work on their speaking skills. Here is a fun example:

I love to take time out to post the fun and cool ideas my fellow teachers are doing in their classrooms. It is always a great way to inspire and encourage one another as East Noble Staff. Please comment if you have other ideas or are inspired by these samples. Mrs. Erexson Second grade teacher at Wayne Center, Mrs. Erexson, has been really excited about the possibilities that her iPads hold for gathering information about her students' learning. Through her classroom set of iPads, she's able to essentially able to meet with every student because she gets to see their responses all from the convenience of her iPad and PC. Using 30 Hands , her student was able to take a picture and report a quick summary about the book. This allows Mrs. Erexson to conference with more students than ever before. Does she have to listen to every video? That's probably not even necessary, but it allows her to do quick and regular checks with students. This activity of taking a picture of t...

I'm extremely excited about the potential ChatterPix Kids holds for students as they can use it to respond to learning in a quick and engaging way. Here is the basic process for ChatterPix Kids: Take a picture Draw a line for the mouth on the object Record your voice for up to 30 seconds Add stickers if necessary Save to the camera roll In reality, we are looking at a project that shouldn't take much more than five minutes to complete. I bet the kids will enjoy using it!  Here is an overview of the whole app: : Here is the final product using the app to report the author's purpose for Tough Cookie: There are lots of ways this application could be used, but here are a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing: Take a picture of an object an add adjectives to describe it. Take a picture of geometric shape and have the shape give its attributes. Take a picture of a character in a book and have them introduce him/herself.  Take a picture ...

Alert, alert, alert! You may want to go and update pic collage on your student iOS devices. If you update now, you get some free holiday backgrounds as well as some sticker packs! This would be espcially fun with Christmas break rapidly approaching. Some sticker packs require that you create an account. If you really want your students to have those stickers, we can create a teacher account, log each device into it and have the students download the stickers. Once they are downloaded, we can then have the students log out of the account so that you do not have to worry about the students posting collages under your name to the entire world. The stickers are still usable even once logged out of the account. 

The first graders at Rome City took a field trip to the Gingerbread Festival today! They were able to take pictures of gingerbread houses and were looking for patterns at the same time. As the first graders were on their trip, Ms. Ruse contacted me over email asking if we could come up with a project on Shadow Puppets to talk about the patterns they saw while on their trip. Here is a small sample of what they created. Using Shadow Puppets is easy. However, we have run into a few issues with it. For example, by having all students signed into the same account, I didn't realize that when a student created a video that it would go to the entire class set of iPods. That was quite a surprise last week. Instead of dismissing it, we trained the students to make sure that they always put their first name in the title and that it was vitally important that they did not change or delete another student's video. This is going to take some practice and quite a few reminders.  ...

Highlights Kids  is a resource that was recently brought to my attention. It is a free resource and can be used in multiple ways for teachers and students.  The "play it" section has quite a few learning games and digital art activities that would work extremely well on an interactive whiteboard. Students could create their own silly stories, do puzzles, unscramble words, along with many other fun activities.  The "read it" section has quite a few short stories and articles that can be accessed on any device. What especially nice is that it will read the text aloud and highlight the words as it reads. The first grade teachers at Wayne Center Elementary are sending specific articles to students through email that they will utilize for vocabulary instruction throughout the whole week. The fact that it also reads the text aloud allows struggling readers to participate as well.