Friday, February 28, 2014

Making Friends With Myon

Sorry, I'm a bad blogger but between my grad school class, after school clubs, and actually teaching first grade I've been a little busy!

Just before Christmas our district purchased a program called Myon for us to use on our iPads, and I was
NOT a fan. I already have Raz-Kids, and the way Myon was presented it just seemed like a less user friendly version of Raz-Kids so I didn't really bother getting to know it (it's not very user friendly or intuitive). However I don't like to be beaten by technology so awhile ago I decided that I needed to conquer the Myon monster and make it my own. Here is what I discovered... as an independent reading tool it doesn't even come close to being as good as Raz- Kids because you have very little control over what kids can and can't read. You also can't assign entire levels of books  a student (sigh)! With that in mind I don't use it at all like it was presented. I use it mainly for three things...

1. Social studies and science- There are so many great books that coincide with our social studies and science curriculum that is amazing. We use them during class,and it almost makes social studies and science like an extra shared reading lesson! Then the kids can download the same books to read or listen to later.


Here we are reading a book about the American flag.
Then they downloaded the book and listened to it, and a few others about the same topic while they worked on an American flag hundreds chart during math!



2. Guided reading- I've also started using Myon during guided reading. It took forever to get a lot of books leveled for use with DRA2  (I'm still working on it) but it's great because my class had a real gift for losing guided books!!! They never loose these, and there are always enough copies!





3. Shared reading- I can project the books with Air Server, or Splashtop, and the kids can all have their own copy for read to self or listen to reading... enough said!


Disclaimer- My bunch is NOT allowed to download any book they want! They can have one "just for fun" book of their choice. The rest of the books they download have to be ones that I picked for shared, guided, or content. If I find other books I delete them! If they picked their own they would ALL be listening books...NOT reading books!

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