colAR mix app

My class has been fascinated with the Aurasma app where we can make images come alive.  So when I learned that the colAR Mix app had some free seasonal coloring pages for the holidays, I decided to try out this app with my first graders.

It was a huge hit!  We will be trying out their New Year's pages in January.  I downloaded the free coloring pages here.

Rudolph Stories in Book Creator

This past week at school we had many festive activities as we approached Christmas break.  On our reindeer day we read several fiction and nonfiction reindeer books. 

 

Then we began to create our own reindeer stories to publish in the Book Creator app on the iPads.  We have the free version of the Book Creator app.  It allows you to create one book at a time.

First we used a graphic organizer to plan each page of our story.

This was our first time using the book creator app.  The students caught on to the tools within the app very quickly.

The students found it very easy to use the drawing tools within the app to add details to their pictures.

They were thrilled to make a cover for their stories.

When the books were complete, we exported them to the Explain Everything app.  In this app, the students recorded themselves reading each page of their stories.  We then saved this project as a video to the camera roll so we could upload them to our Kidblogs.

Here are a few of the finished stories. They are very simple stories since this was our first time using the app.  I'm hoping our next books will contain more details.

 

 

Augmented Letters to Santa

We wrote and typed letters to Santa for our local newspaper.  The students were very excited about the chance to be published in the real newspaper!  We wrote the letters first in class, and then we took them to the computer lab to type for the paper.

I always love reading their Santa letters.  They have the best reasons for how they have earned the new toys.

We then took a picture of our handwritten letters and uploaded them to our Kidblogs.  I wanted to use the Aurasma app to augment our letters to Santa.  I had my service learning student from the high school video each child reading his or her letter.  I was hoping to use each student's letter as the trigger image for his/her video.  I had thought that the handwriting and borders being different would be enough to keep each student video with the correct letter.  It wasn't!  So I took a photo of each student and attached the pictures to the letters.  Then I linked each video to the student's photo.  Now when we scan the photos in the Aurasma app it pulls up the video of each child reading his or her letter to Santa.

Fact Families on the iPads

We have been learning about fact families in math. For one of our fact family activities, I had the students represent a fact family on the iPads.  Each of my students had a different set of numbers to use for his/her fact family. I allowed the students to choose their own math manipulatives to use for this project.  Some chose to use our 2 colored dots and some chose to use our linking cubes.  I also had the students choose between the Popplet app or the Pic Collage app to show their final products. Below are some of the finished products.

Book Talks Tellagami Style

My students love using the Tellagami app.  This is a free app where the students create a character called a Gami and record a 30 second message.  I love this app, as a teacher, because it is a great way for me to hear my student's thinking.  Sometimes in first grade, students have a hard time explaining in writing what they are thinking because of their writing skills.  However, my students are very good at explaining with their words about different topics.

Recently my students used Tellagami to talk about a book from their independent reading.  I feel a book talk from another student is a great motivator for picking up a new book.

Spooky Word Problems

We have been working on addition and subtraction within 20 in math.  We have focused on solving word problems for the past few days and looking for the key words to help us decide if we need to add or subtract.  At the iPad center this week, one of my students created some math equations using the Halloween stamps in the Doodle Buddy app.  She saved her math equations to the photo roll and proudly shared them with me at the end of center time.  The same day, one of my boys had written a word problem in his writing journal during writing workshop.  This was when I decided we should use the Doodle Buddy app to create and solve some word problems, Halloween style using the fun stamps.

The Doodle Buddy app is a free white board app.  I love how easy it is for my students to draw in this app.  The drawing tools are very easy to use and my students love the backgrounds and stamps available in the app.  We have used this app a lot to draw pictures about our thinking.  We then save our images to the photo roll and use our drawings in other apps on the iPads.

This was our first time really typing sentences on the iPads.  We had previously typed math equations and our names, but not complete sentences.  I modeled how to type in the Doodle Buddy app and then they began their word problems.  The students were very proud to show off their spooky word problems.  Here are a few the students created.

Adjectives and iPads

We have been learning about adjectives this past week at school.  We read a few great adjective books. My class really got into The Bug Book.  It had great illustrations of bugs demonstrating different adjectives.  This lesson definately increased our vocabulary as we talked about different shades of meaning for various words in the book.  We also sang several adjective songs and made some adjective charts.

We then used the iPads to demonstrate some of our learning about adjectives.  Our first activity stemmed from these great read alouds.  We used the Explain Everything app in our first activity.  This app is a screencasting, whiteboard app on which you can draw and record.  It is only $2.99 and was very easy for my primary students to use.

My students each chose an animal to draw in the app.  Then they wrote some adjectives to describe their animal in the pictures.  Last they recorded themselves talking about their adjectives.

Another activity we did involved the skitch app.  The students took a photo of themselves in the skitch app.  Then they wrote adjectives that described themselves around them on the photos.

 

Showbie App

At my school, we have one iPad cart to share with all the classrooms.  So, figuring out how to get student work off the iPads became a top priority very quickly.  I had read several posts around the web about student workflow but most were for a 1:1 setting.  After asking a few people, Kristi Meeuwse had recommended looking into the Showbie app.  She has blogged about this app several times on her website iTeach with iPads.  Since she uses it with ease in her Kindergarten class, I thought it might be a good solution for our primary school.

The Showbie app is a free app that allows you to collect, review, and annotate student work.  The teacher can access the work submitted by the students on the iPad or on the Showbie website.  This app allows the students using the iPads to login and out as themselves, so we are able to use it with our shared cart in the school.  Students do not have to have an email address to setup their own account.  I have now been using this app with my first graders since August.  I have found it to be very easy to use with my young learners.

I created some step by step directions for getting started with this app for the faculty at my school.  Click the document to grab your own copy.

Page 1 - 1st time teacher setup of class

Page 2 - 1st time student setup for login

Page 3 - How to create an assignment

Page 4/5 - How student submits an assignment & logs out of the app

QR Codes



I have joined the QR Code craze!  

I am loving incorporating these little codes into my classroom.  My students love scanning them, and I am learning more about how to create classroom activities using them.  I found great examples of classroom activites on the blog of Audrey Colwell and tutorials of how to make them on her QR Code Binge post.

 

To introduce QR codes to our school, I first created a staff development for our back to school meeting. I created a QR code scavenger hunt around our library which linked teachers to awesome website examples of creation apps  being used on iPads to demonstrate learning in primary classrooms.  I linked the QR codes to some examples from the great blogs I have seen recently, such as Matt B. Gomez, Kristi Meeuwse, Kristen Wideen, Kathy Cassidy, and Karen Lirenman.

I used the website http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ to generate my QR codes for free.  I created a page to show how to make codes on this site for teachers at my school.  Here are the directions.  Click the picture to download a copy.

 One activity my class has completed with the QR codes was to unscramble our sight words.  Each QR code brought up a graphic of a scrambled sight word.  The students unscrambled it and recorded the correct sight word on their recording sheet.

I created QR codes to put on our classroom door.  Each child's photo has a QR code that links to his/her Kidblog site.  I thought this would be a great way to introduce our Kidblogs to parents on "Open House" night.