Suzanne's Ed Tech Reflections

As we near the last couple of days of the school year, I have been visiting all of the iAchieve iPod and iPad classrooms. It's awesome to enter a room and hear the cheers of the students that "The iPod Lady is here!" they all know my name but I love the endearment from the students. So welcoming! Wonder if next year's students will dub me The iPod Lady for the third year? I'll let you know!

I love Geobaords. They are such a great manipulative for helping to understand polygons, angles, area, and perimeter. But sometimes it's not fun dealing with bunches of rubber bands in a classroom. The Math Learning Center has come to the rescue with their Geoboard app. Now we have virtual rubber bands to stretch over those pegs to study geometric shapes and angles!

Project iAchieve continues to evolve and expand. Teachers will now be receiving "iPad Media Sets". These iPad Media Sets consist of an iPad, Apple TV, and HD projector. Teachers will be using these tools as part of their classroom instruction. The iPad are being set up with a variety of apps for the teachers to explore and the iPads can be taken home over the summer to help them become familiar with the iPads and plan lessons for the coming year. The first 15 iPad Media Set teachers attended professional development this afternoon and are very excited to begin implementing these tech tools in their classrooms. More teachers and classrooms will be added to this project for the 2012/2013 school year.

Well, things are  progressing with our 7th grade math flipped classroom pilot as we test the waters for next years full implementation. The iPads have gone home all this week and have been returned each daily ready for use in class. The math teacher and I have been co-teaching all this week doing some math instruction but also introducing and modeling good use of the iPad and apps.  We set up the student's Gaggle email accounts and are finding this a good way  for the teacher and students to communicate. Yesterday we introduced PaperPort Notes. We emailed a short student survey to the students and had them "Open In" PaperPort Notes. They learned how to use the pencil tool to write, inserting a text box to type, and we even practiced with the "Tap to Speak" tool using the voice to text capabilities. Today everyone practice creating their own notes in PaperPort Notes. We inserted the different types of paper and used the various annotation tools. The

This week's App of the Week is Skitch. Skitch for Mac has been around for several years but a few months ago they released the IOS version. It's is lots of fun but also very useful. Remember that "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words!"   Learn more at: http://skitch.com/