Fourth Grade at St Mary's Visitation

Six teachers at SMV are piloting iPads in preparation for next year when we hope to have one iPad per teacher and a mobile cart with enough iPads for a whole class.  To become better acquainted with this new tool (okay – let’s face it – this wonderful and incredible toy), I attended a Hands-On iPad Workshop offered by teachers in Wisconsin’s Discovery Educators Network.  There I learned about tools and free apps my students could use to put together projects.

While there are many drawing tool apps available, I was worried using them would take too much time in class.  So instead I had my reading/language arts class choose from a preselected list of homonyms, homophones, and homographs.  They drew pictures of their word pair on recycled copy paper using markers so their pictures would be bright and vibrant.  I showed the first child to finish their drawing how to use the camera app on the iPad.  Together he and I took pictures of his two drawings and saved them to the picture roll library.  I then had him show the next student to be finished with their drawings how to take and save pictures.  Each student in turn learned then taught how to do this task until all students were finished.

Once the pictures were stored on the iPad, we visited the PicCOLLAGE app where we uploaded both pictures.  Again I taught one child how to do this and they taught the next, and so on.  PicCOLLAGE is nice because multiple images, videos, maps, drawings, text boxes, etc can be placed on a single collage.  Students were invited to move, resize, and rotate their pictures then add text boxes for the sentences they wrote for each picture.

When we were all done in PicCOLLAGE, each student transferred their work into the ShowMe app.  Here they were able to record their voices as they read their word and the two sentences that accompanied their pictures.  I showed the first child how to do this and she took care of passing the instructions down the line.  A few had questions about how to delete voice recordings that had goof-ups in them.  I didn’t have the answer but one student confidently stepped forward and showed everyone how to make the corrections.

I uploaded their projects from the iPad to the ShowMe website with the intention of creating a Prezi or an Animoto of their finished work but I couldn’t figure out how to embed or upload their video clips into either web 2.0 tool.  Instead, I embedded them on our class blog so we can share our work and ideas.

Tags: Language Arts, projects, Reading, Writing