Suzanne's Ed Tech Reflections

I walked in to one of our Third Grade iAchieve classrooms on Wednesday right after they had completed a very intense math lesson on fractions where the teacher had included using the iPods. There was only about 10 minutes before the class went to lunch, so the teacher gave the students "free time" on their iPods. They could choose to do anything they wanted. What did they choose? Most of them wanted to play the "Stack the States" app! A fun educational game that helps users learn facts and information about the states - identifying the state, nicknames, cities, bordering states, and so on. When you answer a question correctly, you start stacking the image of that state with others to create a tower. When the tower gets to a specific height you earn a state that gets added to a US map in the app. It's rather addictive! The students asked the teacher to pull down their 20th Century wall map to help them answer questions. This is an ELD (English Language Dev...

Another spring break spent at the Microcomputers in Education Conference (MEC) at ASU. It was a great three days of learning and sharing. Attended several presentations led by Tony Vincent on using Posterous, project based learning, and "Reading in Hand" with iPods and iPads. Tony is always inspiring and shares great new ideas for integrating mobile devices into the classroom. Also learned about some new things on the "Ask a Biologist" website and using the free "Haiku" learning management system. Once again, Robyn and I got to do a presentation to a group of educators about our iAchieve iPod Project and hopefully inspire others with some of the great things that have happened during the year. Looking forward to another great conference again next year!!

Our High Frequency Word Project using SonicPics has been such a success that other teachers and students would like to use this app for creating projects. So, I used SonicPics to create a video tutorial. All of the images are screenshots of the app taken right on my iPod! Enjoy!

Earlier in the year we created high frequency word flashcards for students in the iAchieve Project to use on their iPods. The word lists are a combination of Fry and Marzano words developed by our district literacy specialist. The flashcards created for the project are just sets of words on static flashcards that students can use to build their fluency with the words. This works great for students that already have some familiarity with the words but not for those that first need to learn how to pronounce and read the words. So we decided to create some narrated flash cards using the SonicPics app. This app allows the user to create videos using images and narration. Now, there are 225 words each for Grades 1, 2, and 3, and 40 words for Kindergarten. That’s a total of 715 words! I could have created all of the videos myself – but I’m not sure students want to just listen to me. The decision was made to have students create the videos. I began working with a group of students at...