Suzanne's Ed Tech Reflections

HEY YOU GUYYYYYS! We now have a new app on the iPods! PBS and Sesame Workshop have developed a learning app centered around many of the word skills children learn on the Electric Company PBS show and at school. This is an arcade game style app that helps learners build literacy skills through the manipulation of words and sounds. Students will be able to create over 300 words focusing on Silent E, Hard and Soft C, Transformer H, and more. This word game includes 9 music videos starring the Electric Company characters and other celebrities. While watching the videos, players collect “word balls” and then use them in other levels of the games to create words. Students earn points as they play. Players must interact with the first three videos in order to unlock the subsequent videos in the game. Audio instructions are given throughout the game but you can also access written instructions by tapping “About” and selecting the “Help” menu. The app is free until February 14 and will...

On Friday, January 21, Jennifer Lane, Maricopa County Technology Integration Specialist, and I spent some time observing in iPod classrooms. We went to several different classrooms at different schools and got to see the iPods being used in a variety of ways. Two of the classrooms were using the iPods during their reading centers. Students were doing reading fluency recordings and evaluating their recordings with an oral reading fluency rubric while others practiced their reading fluency by buddy reading using the K12 Timed Reading app. Other students were recording themselves reading their high frequency words flash cards on the iPods. Yes, we can have two things open at once on our iPods! One of the teachers created a flash card fluency recording sheet for students to use to keep track of their progress. Several other students were practicing grammar skills using several of the apps we have installed on the iPods. A couple of classes were working on the reading Essential Perf...

I find that there is always something new to learn about the iPods and new ways to complete training with teachers and students. Today was definitely a day for both! We have been administering the Speak Up Survey with our iPod students and can actually take the survey using the iPods. The trickiest part is logging in – the web address is quite long and difficult for the students to type in. I’ve tried having the students type in the address and also gone into classrooms well ahead of our scheduled time and logged in each of the iPods. Both are long and tedious tasks. Well, lo and behold, you can sync Safari bookmarks to the iPods! Today I worked with a teacher that has a dedicated laptop just for sinking the iPods. We made sure that there were no other bookmarks in Safari first. I bookmarked the Speak Up Survey address in Safari, connected the iPods to sync, clicked the Info tab for each iPod and checked “Sync Safari Bookmarks.” This took a little time upfront for me, but it w...

Our district adopted curriculum provider for K-5 Reading and Language Arts is Houghton Mifflin. Their website, eduplace.com, has a lot of student resources for practicing skills on the computer. But we have now discovered that several of these resources also work on the iPods – specifically those for Houghton Mifflin English. Exciting! Here are examples of the Houghton Mifflin Resources that can be accessed on the iPods: ·    Wacky Web Tales: similar to Mad Libs where students enter various parts of speech to create a “wacky” story ·    Bright Ideas for Writing: prompts for a variety of writing genres, many with picture support ·    Grammar Blast: answer questions correctly to practice those important grammar skills ·    Evaluation Station: use your draft and your iPod to evaluate your written work ·    Writer’s Showcase: view examples of different writing genres So, how can you access these activities? Open the Safari web brow...

I'm always amazed at the ingenuity of our students. See how this group of students created "stands" for their iPods:

I walked into one of our classrooms Tuesday morning and the teacher and students were all engaged in using the iPods. Third graders have recently been learning about the organizational features in expository texts, such as the Table of Contents and Index. They were  using the StoryKit app to create their own expository books with organizational features and had started these  holiday books the previous day by creating their Title Pages. As I entered the room, they were working on a Table of Contents for the books. The teachers modeled and directed the students, taking comments and feedback from students as needed. They all gave some input as to the holidays they would include and the page numbers each should go on. The following day they began adding content to the pages and drawing their own illustrations for the books. The teacher shared that is was so quiet in the room while they were working, you could hear a pin drop! When they are finished the teacher is going to...

Well, it's 2011 and we have finished the first half of the 10-11 school year. The iAchieve teachers have had several months to get comfortable with using the iPods in the classroom and we anticipate seeing some great things happening over the next few months. I have shared a wide variety of things I have seen in the iAchieve classrooms already but wanted to briefly share a couple more ideas our innovative teachers have implemented: One of our teachers is using the 3rd grade High Frequency Word flash cards we added to the iPods to review syllabication principles. Students open up a flash card in the Doodle Buddy Whiteboard app and use the drawing tools to identify the syllables. Students can then save a picture of their work to Saved Photos. While working on organizational features of expository texts, one teacher simply had her students Google "Parts of a Book" and directed them to go to the second link on the page. She had done this prior to the lesson so she cou...