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Penny Dolan, first grade teacher at South River, and Autumn Pequignot, kindergarten teacher at Lacey Spring, used Animoto this week to review concepts and engage their young audiences. Students filmed their ideas and collectively created an easily shared video demonstrating creativity and concept of material.
Autumn Pequignot, a kindergarten teacher at Lacey Spring Elementary School, decided to breathe some life into her SOLs. Instead of paper dolls, puppets, or props, Mrs. Pequignot's students picked up iPads and used Puppet Pals to display their story language in their retelling of Cinderella. In their second use of Puppet Pals, they are quickly becoming professional storytellers!
Julia Geisert, CRES Kindergarten teacher, speaks about her use of iPods and QR codes with her students. These tools have become routine in her instruction now and her students love it!
These fifth graders do! Bethany Deputy, fifth grade teacher at Linville-Edom, pilots Google Classroom in both of her writing classes. These tech savvy students collaborate and create in the Cloud every day.
Mrs. Deputy and her writing students use the Kaizena plug-in to voice record their writing. Kaizena is the perfect platform to use both teacher and peer review to enhance writing skills. Students listen to the recordings in the editing phase of the writing process.
Writing a book has definitely changed since we were in elementary school! Students are putting markers and pencils down and picking up iPads. Book Creator is a kid-friendly app, allowing students to tell their story with photos, video, text, drawings, and voice recordings. Students in Mrs. Moyers' first grade classroom worked on their digital book in small groups with a teacher, while fifth graders in Mrs. Jantzi's library classes worked in pairs. Students created a storyboard before reaching for the iPad--good writing practices never change!
Now these first and fifth grade authors can use Book Creator in other classes to present reports and write their stories.
Tellagami is especially fascinating to first graders--your "paper doll" comes to life with your voice! Melissa Moyers, first grade teacher at Lacey Spring Elementary School, wanted a little something different with book talks in reading groups. The assignment: choose your favorite book, build an avatar, and explain why. Students took pictures of their books for the background in their book talk.
Tellagami was originally created to send greetings in social media, but the sky's the limit with educational applications! Gamis, nickname for the finished product, are incredibly easy to share and export from the iPad. This first grade classroom can't wait to create more!
Autumn Pequignot, Kindergarten teacher at LSES, wanted to create an engaging and truly adorable "I am thankful" digital project with her class. Student audio recordings made in Quicktime were uploaded to Vocaroo.com. QR codes from Vocaroo were layered over student pictures in Google Drawings. It was that easy! Their digital creations went from a hallway display to a classroom book, which students still enjoy.
Susan Anderson, 6th grade English teacher at JFHMS, saw her students were getting bored just listening about figurative language so she decided to have them be more interactive with their learning. She asked her students to research and create either a Powtoon or Prezi presentation for the rest of the class about the types of figurative language. They were excited, engaged, and even worked from home - voluntarily!
"The goal of this assignment was to use the Internet to find rich literary examples of figurative language and poetic elements. Students were instructed to find examples and analyze the quality of the example for the type of figurative language they wanted to feature. Each student had to include simile, metaphor, alliteration, onomatopoeia, idiom, hyperbole, imagery, symbol and for fun, pun. I asked my 6th grade students to look for specific examples in the writings of Langston Hughes, John Steinbeck, and F. Scott Fitzgerald and other gifted and well known poets and writers. Students then took the examples they found and created a Powtoon or Prezi presentation and shared their project with their peers and me," describes Ms. Anderson.
Here's a Powtoon created by a student in Ms. Anderson's class: