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...

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...