Friday, September 13, 2013

Blogging Our First Year With 1:1 iPads Week Two

We just finished up week two with our iPads and we are still going strong! We worked on perfecting old skills, and mastering new ones. My kiddos continue to amaze me with their quick mastery of these devices. All but one of my kiddos have mastered their Lexia and Raz-Kids logins, nobody has asked for help in several days! The first new skill we embarked on was typing our spelling words into the notes section of the iPads.

They did a great job, and I saved TWENTY copies. The only thing I would have done differently in hindsight was to give them some explore time with notes. It would have made my life a lot easier!!

The next success was mine! I mastered mClass and got over half of my DIBELS done. The only problem is that you can't stop the timer if you get interrupted which is frustrating to no end!!!  It was also a bit of a trial getting it all loaded onto the iPads, but now that it's on I LOVE it. It saves so much time. I don't have to enter anything. It's all automatic.

Another bit of new learning that we are embarking on is number talks. If you're at all familiar with number talks you've probably heard of rekenreks. Normally you have to buy a pricy class set or make them out of yarn, cardboard, and beads (like I want to spend my free time doing that). My way is much easier...we just downloaded the Free Math Rack app. Here we are making five in different ways during number talks.



Our final task of the week was to get ready  to show all we have learned in science. Next week I'll co-teach with our teacher librarian and the kids will create Popplets. After the "notes" experience I decided to give them a chance to free explore within the Popplets lite app. I was amazed!!!!!
We talked about how they would learn more by just working with the app than by my teaching them how. It took less than two minutes for them to figure out how to get pictures from their photo streams and add them to the Popplets, change colors, take pictures and add them, type labels, and draw pictures.



I let them go for about fifteen minutes and they are totally ready to  create their projects. I was also impressed by the level of collaboration I saw. Only two asked me for help, and they were quickly rescued by fellow classmates. There was a lot of "Ooooohhh how did you do that?,  "I'll show you!" , "Who needs help?", and "I can help people!" flying around our room today. I think people assumed that these devices would isolate the kids from each other and decrease their collaboration skills. In reality the opposite is true, when they collaborate using the iPads there is less fighting and arguing, and it goes much more smoothly in general.

 



Love it!!!

Stay tuned  until next week for our finished Popplets!!







5 comments:

  1. Wow! This blog will quickly become one of my favorites. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and hard work. Thank you for all that you do for our community each day.

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  2. I like the idea with the spelling lists! I use a+ spelling. It provides multiple"games" and data on practice. I tell my first graders if they can read it, they should be able to spell it. I have trained them to use a+ spelling during daily five

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  3. I also love your rekenrak math mats. I use number pieces and number lines ( with the frog select teaching tool), find the sums ( this is an iPhone app), and todo math. These programs fit perfectly with our ccap planning documents for first grade. Also app tutor AWP addition word problems is one of my extended flipped lessons at home. I would love to collaborate your friendly fellow 1:1 first grade teacher at Lumberg Elementary.

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  4. Jennifer, we're going to add A+ spelling next week. I wish I could combine the two programs, because that would be perfect. The record feature on Spelling Free is optional. With A+ you have to use it. I have some kiddos with speech issues that need to hear the real pronunciation. I would love to collaborate with you, and I'll look at those apps. I'll need them next week while I am knocking out those math screeners :( I'll sent you a school e-mail so we can get together. If we share ideas then the sky is the limit!! Thanks for reading!

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