Suzanne's Ed Tech Reflections

 Pic Collage is a fun, easy to use app for creating picture collages from the photos on your iPad. A lot of teachers seem to overlook this app because it looks like a fun way to create collages of your family and friends, but really it has great educational uses too. Students can create collages showing what they saw and learned on field trips or during classroom presentations, show examples from science fair projects or add to their classroom reports, create book reports focusing on characters or story elements. The list just goes on. These girls created posters on their iPads about books they have read for their Battle of the Books competition in 4th grade!   Click Here to download the iPad App of the Week Check out these examples of PicCollage projects from other classrooms: Pixels and Paintbrushes

When was the last time you heard this conversation on a Friday afternoon in a middle school classroom? Student 1: What are you going to do when you go home this afternoon? Student 2: I'm going to play some chess on my iPad! On Fridays one of our 8th grade Math Flipped Classrooms has an extra class period to work on math enrichment. They have started a little chess club in the classroom where students are learning to play chess on their iPads. The students are really excited and learning problem solving, critical thinking, and strategy skills.      One of the students is so excited that he created a chess club website for the class. Monte Vista Chess Online We have also downloaded a couple of free Chess apps so students can use these along with the Chess websites they have been using.

Check out these online graphic organizers from Holt: Holt Interactive Graphic Organizers The site has over 30 graphic organizers for a variety of tasks. Each graphic organizer is interactive and can be downloaded onto a computer with Adobe Reader and be filled out right on the computer. There are also Teaching Notes available with tips and lesson ideas for each organizer What we really appreciate is that they also work on the iPads! Using the "Open In" feature in an IOS web browser such as Safari or Chrome, you can import the graphic organizer into the Adobe Reader app and easily fill in the fields. Students can then take a screenshot of the completed graphic organizer to share with their teacher or import into another iPad project.

A couple of Saturdays ago we facilitated an iPad Media Kit Training with a group of teachers from one of our schools. Each teacher's iPad Media Kit consists of an iPad, an Apple TV, and an HDMI projector. iPad                                         Apple TV                     Epson HDMI Projector While we have several different models for using iPads in the classroom, including 1:1 and shared carts, the iPad Media Kit creates a one iPad classroom. Teachers can use the iPad as a learning center, to share student work, and use the iPad as a presentation tool during instruction. Since we have some teachers that have never used or even held an iPad before, we spend a lot of time on basics. We introduce the Apple TV and HDMI projector to them and go over how to set them up in the classroom. We cover the basics of using the iPad which includes swiping, powering down, opening/closing apps, using the multi-tasking tool bar, etc. We want them to take ownership of their new mo

One of the projects that has helped us to better create home-school connectors and involve parents in the learning process is the implementation of Academic Parent Teacher Teams (APTT). As a participant in the program, parents attend 3 parent meetings during the year where they learn about their child's academic progress and ways they can help with learning at home along with an extended parent-teacher conference times where they can really focus on the specific needs of each student. Learning to access assessment data online. The iPads have become an invaluable tool in supporting the APTT meetings. Parents are able to access student assessment data, view projects, and listen to audio recordings done by their student. Teacher explanation about instruction and supporting learning at home. Parents really do love seeing and hearing what their students are doing in school. Listening to her child's recording!  Listening together!