Commemorative Coin Keynote

Students in Fourth Grade at Jamestown Elementary School created designs for commemorative coins as a review of the famous Virginians they studied in the Revolutionary War unit. Each pair of students chose a person from a list of five famous Virginians (Jack Jouett, James Lafayette, Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson) and used their digital notebooks, in iBooks, and Safari to research ten facts about that person. They recorded their ten facts on a slide in Keynote. The opening slide of the Keynote needed a picture of the person, and this was acquired through a Google search on Safari. The students then used Drawing Pad to design both sides of a coin commemorating one important event in the person's life. Once the drawings were completed, the students imported the images into Keynote and created a slide for each. They also wrote descriptions. Once completed, the presentations were posted to DropBox to share with others.

Loyalist or Patriot Movie Trailers

Students in Fourth Grade at Jamestown Elementary School depicted the difficult choice made by early colonists living in Virginia at the start of the Revolutionary War. Each pair of students was given a script and told to use their creativity to act out the difficult decision. Using iMovie on the iPad, the students used one 45 minute period to record their actions. They were given an additional 45 minute period to add the text, choose graphics and layouts, and export their finished trailer to the Photo Album. Once finished, all the movies were uploaded to the teacher's desktop to be shared through Blackboard.

Regions Of Virginia

Fourth Graders at Jamestown Elementary created review movies about the geographic regions of Virginia. Working in pairs, they used their digital textbooks, in iBooks, to research five facts about their assigned region. Then the students used Drawing Pad to draw a map of Virginia. They were required to accurately color in the assigned region and label it on their map. The next step was to open iMovie, import the picture and then do a voice over with the five facts they researched. After putting it all together, they exported the video to the camera roll. Once finished, they uploaded their video to the teacher's desktop and then it was uploaded to Blackboard for everyone to view.

Pre Kindergarten International Unit

During this month’s multi-cultural/ international unit I pulled my students out in small groups during playtime to explore the My Big World Application on the iPad.  It was very easy for the children to navigate and they had a lot of fun exploring different places on the map and doing the corresponding puzzles and activities.  What was particularly great about the application was that the children could use it independently with minimal supervision in small groups.   Not only did it reinforce and expand their knowledge of the different countries we were learning during our unit, but it also was a great opportunity to work on turn taking skills and working independently with peers using a very motivating activity.  

Pre-Kindergarten Shape Unit

In conjunction with our shape unit during the month of December we utilized the Doodle Buddy iPad application to reinforce the shapes we were learning and work on our pre-writing skills.  Each day at our circle we would review the shape we had learned at our morning meeting and each child would have the opportunity to try to draw it on the iPad.  It was a wonderful activity that the children all really enjoyed and that worked on both their emerging mathematical skills and fine motor skills.  Although the students in my class have a wide range of cognitive and fine motor abilities, by using the Doodle Buddy application each child regardless of their abilities could see the tangible result of their efforts.  

Diálogos en Comic Life

4th-grade students often listen to and interpret Spanish-language dialogues in Spanish class. This year I put a twist on it by having the students create a comic using the dialogue. This additional step required students to interpret the conversation and then add appropriate images to convey the feelings and content of the conversation. These pre-recorded dialogues often accompany world-language textbook "systems" and are in line with the curriculum, so all I had to do was choose several conversations from our unit of study to provide to students as a choice. As an added and unforeseen bonus, a few students actually chose to write their own dialogues!

Apps:

• Comic Life
• Camera
• Dropbox
• Pages

Steps:

1. Students listened to dialogues and discussed their meaning with the each other.
2. Students received a written copy of the dialogues and chose one for the project. Students also viewed a sample Comic Life dialogue created by me (the teacher).
3. Students accessed a Pages document on Dropbox from which they copied and pasted the lines from their dialogues. *Tip: copying and pasting became a bit problematic, so some students chose to type the dialogue directly into Comic Life. Should students prefer this method, I suggest adding the International Keyboard for your language in Settings. This will prevent spell check from substituting the other language's words with English and will give students easy access to typing characters not available on the English keyboard.
4. Students became the characters in the dialogues by taking pictures of themselves and adding to the comic. *Tip: this presented a great opportunity to invite parent volunteers in to escort the students around the school to take the most appropriate pictures.
5. Students shared the final comic to Dropbox as a pdf file.

Teacher Tools

Here are two great teacher tools for iPad integration. Check them out:

Bloom's Taxonomy for iPads

Apps for Multiple Intelligences

5th Grade Reading Projects Using iMovie

The 5th grade created movie and movie trailers using iMovie on the iPad.  The project was designed to demonstrate students' knowledge of story elements based on their reading group novel. Students collaborated to plan and create their iMovies.  Groups began by using a storyboard organizer.  Many students chose to organize their iMovie using the apps Popplet Lite and Corkulous.  After planning, groups filmed scenes using the built in camera on the iPad.  They organized the clips in iMovie and added music, voice over, and transitions.  Students presented their movies to the class to spark interest in reading their novel.  Teachers used a rubric to grade the final presentations.  Some students chose to use iStop Motion to create stop motion videos.

The app workflow for the project is as follows:

BookReportLegoAnimation from Jamestown Elementary School on Vimeo.

Third Grade Creating Graphs

Third grade students used numbers on the iPad to create bar graphs. Students collected data from their classmates to complete their graph. They first created the graphs in their math notebooks. They then used numbers on the iPad to enter in the data and created their bar graphs. After creating a bar graph some students created a pie graph. They made observations as to the similarities and differences between the graphs.

Third Grade Word Problems

Third grade students used the skitch and drawing pad apps to create their own addition and subtraction word problems. Each student wrote a word problem and illustrated it. They then switched iPads and their peers solved the word problems. 

Pebble go planets in Kindergarten!

The Kindergarten students used iPads to research the 8 planets.  Using the Safari app and  pebblego.com, they learned facts about the planets.  They used their observation skills to color a solar system sheet for their "Where do I live?" books from looking at the pictures from this website.