Suzanne's Ed Tech Reflections

Over the past couple of weeks I have been helping a couple of our iAchieve iPod project teachers and their students set up Gaggle.net email on the iPods. The teachers are excited about using this so that students can email projects to them directly from their iPods. And it will be a nice way for them to all communicate. I think the students learned a lot about email from the process - and they are certainly familiar with their email addresses as they had to type them in multiple times during the set up! We also had an opportunity to talk about email etiquette as they sent their first messages to the teacher. One of the teachers contacted me today to let me know that the students were able to email links to their StoryKit books. Here is an example of one of the books: Pretty awesome. I am anxious to hear about other ways the students and teachers find to use iPod email!

This week I began working with a group of students to add their Gaggle.net email accounts to their iPods. This will be a great way for the students to share their assignments and projects with their teachers. Over the weekend I came across this blog post by Terice Schneider entitled " What I Wish I'd Done Before Deploying iPads to 735 Middle Schoolers ". She relayed a series of events they had encountered as these middle school students began sending emails - lots and lots of emails. So now they are taking a step back and training the students on proper email etiquette. I really appreciated her list of "topics we plan to cover". This got me thinking about how we tend to take email for granted in today's global world but our students really don't have the skills and knowledge of how to communicate properly using this medium. Terice may have been talking about middle school students, but this definitely applies to any students - and even some adu

Just learned about this great new App website called Appitic ( http://appitic.com/ ) created by four Apple Distinguished Educators. All of the Apps are educational and have been organized into categories, including Blooms Taxonomy and Multiple Intelligences. In  addition to the main categories (e.g., Blooms Taxonomy or Themes), the Apps have been separated into subcategories. For example, under Blooms Taxonomy and Creation they have broken it down into Apps that that could be used for storytelling, video telling, animating, or podcasting.   This will definitely be one of my first "go to places" when looking for new Apps for our iPods and iPads in the classroom!

Many of our teachers have created a "focus wall" for the iPods and iPads that highlight rules, procedures, and ways to use them. I thought this one was especially interesting. Love the "App of the Day" in gold letters!   Have you seen any interesting iPod or iPad focus walls in classrooms? Be sure to share!

A big focus of our iAchieve iPod project has been to increase reading proficiency. Having students create oral reading fluency recordings using Voice Memos on their iPods is an engaging and motivating way to help develop strong readers. We have several new teachers in our project classrooms this year and I have been working on getting both the teachers and their students trained to complete fluency recordings. I spent time in several classrooms last week doing this. It motivating for me to see and hear the student's excitement about learning this process! As soon as I enter a room the waves and whispers that the " iPod Lady" is here begin. After our learning session I get hugs, high fives, thank yous, and even stickers from the students. I returned to one classroom at the end of the day and the teacher shared that the excitement continued throughout the day. Whenever the students had completed an assignment, they instantly got out their iPods and began recording t