Hi everyone, it's Becky! I'm linking up with DoodleBugs Teaching for Five For Friday! MLK day and the snowy weather really made for a short week! Even though it was a short one, it was probably one of the busiest weeks I've had this year!
Greg and I spent some of our time on Monday mapping out a presentation we will be giving at Elizabethtown College (our alma mater!) to the ed majors for their professional development day! I am honored that they have invited us to speak about technology in the classrooms, but also a bit nervous. Although Greg has done presentations like these many times, this will be my first...with hopefully more to come!
We had our "A Community Is..." movie premiere on Tuesday and invited our parents to come in and share in the excitement of watching our first movie together. Everyone loved it, and I really think the parents were surprised at the end product! This was definitely a memorable project for all involved. You can see my blog post on the movie making process here.
Since the movie was only 2 minutes long, and I had the parents in the room, I thought it would be a good idea to have the students show their parents how we use our iPads as learning tools. One goal of our district's move to a 1:1 environment is to educate the parents and public that our iPads are not to "play" on, but are used as a tool to create and showcase our learning. So I had my students do a QR code activity, as well as work on a journal writing and math app together. The parents were really into it!
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And if the movie premiere wasn't enough, I had my formal observation on Wednesday. I decided to go big and have my principal see me introduce Educreations to my kids and use it to create a compare and contrast slide with the animal groups we had been reading about in our Journeys anthology. I was a little worried about how it would go because my kids had never even opened up the app before that lesson! I had my kids work in parnters to alleviate the anxiety that sometimes comes with trying something new. It also allowed for collaboration. We then went step-by-step in the beginning stages. I modeled how to do a step, and they did it. After modeling the stage one or two times, my kids were ready to do it on their own! I was pleasantly surprised at how well they grasped onto Educreations and could complete the rest on their own! I had been having nightmares of me having to run around to every set of partners fixing things the whole time...and it was NOTHING like that! Everything went so smoothly, and I have the confidence that my kiddos will be able to navigate through Educreations even better the next time! And, they LOVED it! I don't even think they realized they were doing school work! Check out two examples of their work!
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Due to our short days this week, I was only able to introduce our Primary Source Football Edition to my first graders. Although we only discussed the pictures for 10-15 minutes, my kids were hooked! They loved looking at the football pictures from long ago! My favorite question/discussion so far was when we were looking at the fan pictures. One of my little girls asked, "Where are all the girls?!" Another one then said, "I don't think they were into football long ago." I asked them where they thought the women were, and they thought the women were at home taking care of the kids! #probablyright!
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Thanks for stopping by! Be sure to check out the other great blog posts at the Five for Friday linky party!
