Welcome to the Teaching with Technology blog. If you are looking for something specific, use the categories button to the right to narrow down the topic. You can also use the search button. Or feel free to peruse the archives. If you see something interesting or have any questions, please let me know! :)
For Roanoke County SPED Teachers Only!
Here is a quick How-To on signing out of the iTunes Store. The steps are simple:
Go to Settings>iTunes and App Stores
Click where it says Apple ID: xxxxxxx@gmail.com
Choose Sign Out.
Remember that SPED iTunes Accounts are not to be used to purchase apps…only to update the existing ones on your iPad. Your iPad should never be logged into SPED accounts in the area above.
Socks in Mrs. Howell’s class have been singing! Not student’s real socks, thank goodness, but virtual socks on the iPad app Sock Puppets! Take a look:
Sock Puppet Music from Tina Coffey on Vimeo.
Students in Mrs. Atkin’s and Mrs. Glowenski’s classes created Needs and Wants Posters using Pic Collage on the iPads. They used the camera feature to take pictures of items around their classroom. Many students found creative ways to represent concepts, especially wants. I love that most any age can use Pic Collage. It is definitely one of my favorite apps. Check out a few examples of the First Graders’ work below:
Students in Mrs. Sharp’s 5th Grade class created creatures using their geometry skills to populate “The Geo-zoo.” Mrs. Sharp had done the activity years before using paper and shapes, but wanted to engage her students by using the iPads. We quickly were able to transfer the activity to a digital one.
Last Year’s Paper Version
Digital Version
Thanks to the iPad apps Geoboard, Pic Collage, and Dropbox, students were able to complete a project based activity (that normally was done as a homework project) within one class period. By the end of class time, Mrs. Sharp had a great understanding of her students’ strengths with Math SOL 5.13 (The student, using plane figures (square, rectangle, triangle, parallelogram, rhombus, and trapezoid), will develop definitions of these plane figures; and investigate and describe the results of combining and subdividing plane figures.)
Check out the process below:
The best part was that the students were completely engaged and absolutely loved their creations! Many even posted them on their blogs :
Rock Star Laser Robot by Double O Cleo
The Triangle Vampire from by Minecraft02
Tari the Tri-con by I Love Lax
Here are few examples of their awesome work:
If you are interested in doing a similar activity with your class, here is our STEM (Children’s Engineering) design brief and a couple versions of rubrics.
Let me know how it goes! And…if you are at one of my schools, I’d love to come in to help! Ask me! :)
Have you checked out the courses lately in iTunes University? The teachers at Boyne City Schools have been busy. They have created a wide variety of iTunes U Courses on subjects that are suitable for elementary schools. If you haven’t taken a look, make sure you do! These courses contain activities using video, audio, ibooks, and apps. They also include project based activities. You do need an iPad or iPod Touch to really use these courses. Here are a few of my favorite:
And I love their course for teachers and principals on Flipping Professional Development!
Take a look at the news article about students using these courses in class. But don’t worry, you don’t need your students to have their very own iPads (thought it would be SO nice if they did). These lessons would still work great with the carts we have.
Boyne City is in Michigan, so they are using Common Core Standards. That means that some of these units might work for other grade levels in Virginia than indicated.
If you are a teacher at one of my schools and would like to use any part of these courses with your students, let me know. I’ll make sure the course is loaded on the iPads at your school!
Have you heard of Flocabulary? It’s a website that does hip hop songs to help students remember certain facts. It started with SAT vocab, but has expanded to all levels and subjects. To have access to all the videos/songs you need to pay a fee, but a few are free…including the one for Egypt, which you can watch here.
Note the lyrics below the song (they are clickable) and the resources to go with it on the right hand side of the page. I will warn you…you will be singing the chorus to this in your head all day after you hear it, or at least I did! :)
There are other free videos too worth checking out on the site, including Confessions of a Planet (Space), On Trial! (Test Taking Vocabulary), Let Freedom Ring (Civil Rights), This Ain’t Working (American Revolution), Place Value, Scientific Method of Madness, and more! There is a vocabulary section broken down by grade level and tons of other great videos in the paid version. You can also download songs in iTunes (for $.99 each). Take a look (and listen). I think you will love these!
Mrs. Sander’s students created poetry Voicethreads with their orginal poems. Check them out!
I absolutely LOVE Pic-Collage because it can be used in any subject or grade level. Think virtual poster. It’s safe (you can turn off the ability to pull pictures from the web in settings), and it’s FREE. It’s pretty intuitive if you play around with it, but just in case, here’s a tutorial on how to use it:
Pic Collage for IPad and IPhone Tutorial from Roben-Marie Smith on Vimeo.
Figurative Language with Second Grade
I would LOVE to help you and your students learn how to use this app!! It’s so fun and easy, and the kids love it!
Students in Mrs. Mulvaney’s and Mrs. Downey’s class have been reading a book about the San Francisco Earthquake. Mrs. Downey created an activity where students used iPads to demonstrate their understanding of the parts of a non-fiction book, as well as a few concepts from the book itself. These students had worked with Pic Collage before when creating bat posters, but this is the first time they worked on a project without any technology support from me. They did a wonderful job and even posted their creations on their blogs! Check out a few examples below! If you would, while you are checking them out, leave a comment! The student’s love to get comments on their work!
Mrs. McGee’s class has been working hard on Glog using Glogster EDU to demonstrate their understanding of the famous people they have studied. After a quick tutorial on how to use the programs, Mrs. McGee and her students were off and running. Here are a few examples of their hard work. Click on the top right corner icon to see them full size.
You can see all the class’ glogs on this wiki: McGee’s Class
