Blogging our First Year With 1:1 iPads Week Five

I want to be totally real on this blog so people realize that our journey with iPads is not all sunshine and roses. So far things have gone pretty smoothly but this week we really hit a wall! Due to reasons I cannot elaborate on kindergarten and first grade students are not being allowed to use e-mail at this time. This has been a real struggle for us because e-mail was the only way for students to share things with me, and my only way to comment on work done on their iPads.

This conundrum of them not being able to share things with me has really limited what we can do with the iPads. One of our tech goddesses "Mrs. H" had a great idea. She thought we could do our sharing through Google docs. This proved to be easier said then done. It took some time to get their drives set up, but it was doable with the help of "Mrs. H" and "Mr. T' we got it done. I could NEVER have done it alone!! Thanks guys! As a disclaimer my kids are VERY tech savvy and so am I, but  this Google drive thing is not something I would try alone with any primary kiddos, it was almost too much for us so unless your kids have high level iPad skills I would skip it.

Then, we tried to have them do an assignment I sent them which was way...way...way to hard. My kiddos just could not do it, and these kids are super tech savvy, and amazing on their iPads. So for now, even after all that HARD work I'm not sure we're going to use it much. I'm trying to create a visual step by step guide for them to use for sharing things with me, but when you look at it closely there are an insane number of steps required to create and share a goggle doc. I just don't think we're there yet! I ended up feeling very defeated. E-mail was simple, it has very few steps, and they were good at it. I miss it, but I can't change things so I'm trying to figure something else out! I will conquer this obstacle!!!
I'm thinking about asking approval for kMail, a free kid safe app where I could control who they can send and receive e-mail from.

The saving grace of our iPad week came on family math night. It was AMAZING!!! I spent hours setting up a SMART slide with all our math apps with icons and exact app names (some of them are really strange) so parents and kids could download things fast and easy. It worked great, before long they were playing together! I could not wipe the smile on my face! They had the most fun with the Math Slide apps

With these apps up to four people can play. It was so fun to watch our kids and parents battle it out!

My little friend "Miss. K" was starting to worry that mom would beat her!

Stay tuned for a post with all the math apps I shared with parents...