Createch-ing

This week we have been practicing robotics in Room 10.  We first brainstormed what do we use robots for in everyday life. We discovered that robots are often used for dangerous or difficult tasks for humans.  We then  decided our project : we will make a map of Alberta's  Natural Regions and we will make our robot tour around some landmarks in our province.  We did a couple of challenges to practice and refresh our memory before our expert, Richard Gaskell , came to our class. We also learned decimals in class because we are going to need them to program our robots. Estimation has also been a handy strategy to figure out the # of rotations needed. Today we were doing an advanced challenge. The students drew some letters with tape on the floor and the robots had to trace them. It was not easy, that is for sure, it involved decimals, angles moving backwards... but there was lots of determination and engagement and the results started to appear just in time. It was so

Bienvenidos a todos los profesores españoles que acaban de llegar a Alberta. Espero que tengáis una buena experiencia! Jornada de Bienvenida para los 48 profesores visitantes de Alberta, Canadá pic.twitter.com/r5N8juTd8d — Melissa Valdes (@melissavaldesv) September 29, 2014

My class  has been designing a Minecraft town garbage detector robot. The presentation will be on May 5th. I will be showing pictures of their creations.

We have finished our unit about India this week with an iPad activity.  After studying about India and its quality of life and guided by Srta.Palma, students created this beautiful hand art. It turned out much nicer than I thought initially, given the difficulty of the art.  I like to use iPads at the end of a learning unit as a recap or reflection of what they have been learning. In this case, we put everything together using the app "Popplet" that functions like a mind map. It is very easy to use, students just tap the screen twice to add a "popplet" ( box) and then write, draw or add a picture inside.  I introduced the terms "fact" and "opinion" to summarize the information they learnt about India and add their thoughts too. They wrote five or six sentences that had different facts and their opinions about India . Then they put it all together in a Popplet.  As a visual learner, I love this mind maps to summarize a learning un

This is the link to the news on Calgary Herald...check it out! Spanish program struggles with demand

We have been doing multiplication for the last few weeks. One of the art projects was related to one of the multiplication strategies: using an array. Students had to design an "Array City" ( Ciudad de matrices in Spanish) designing buildings that had different number of rows of windows. They had to be able to express that with a multiplication equation . They first did a draft on their journals. Then they transferred that to an acetate page using a sharpie. The "windows" have to be big enough to be able to color in with a pastel crayon. Then they colored it using pastels . We finally glued it to a black piece of cardboard. After the art was done, I wanted them to work on the language component of it. We used the iPad app  'thinglink "  to label the pictures with the descriptions , both written and orally in Spanish. They posted them on their kidblog page. This is one example: I really like how thinglink provides a whole different level of c

Yesterday, the CCTCA 2014 concluded with a stellar keynote, Chris Hadfield. I had a wonderful experience this year at all levels, with my presentation on "iPads for Bilingual Education" and also with all the workshops that I went to.  I got to meet people that were my colleagues online and see partner teachers that I hadn't seen for a long time. I had a great time diving into the books at the exhibitors place. I found some interesting books for Spanish bilingual program( there were not many though).  But I have to say that this was an emotional conference , there were tears, hugs , laughter....I feel overwhelmed by the response of the teachers to my presentation. I hope they did not ended up saturated with apps and projects. The presentation and agenda of the session are shared in the CCTCA webpage for future reference. I would love to hear from them if they put into practice some of the ideas or come up with new ones. I had a great audience and I am thankful for the

We have used PicCollage quite a lot lately to do vocabulary recap both in Science and Spanish . We have been studying different verbs in Spanish ( only in the present tense) and it was time to remember all of them. So I asked my grade 3/4s to create a poster with pictures that illustrated these verbs together with a sentence that explained that verb.  I really like PicCollage to do remembering activities. They are not one of the most complex and creative projects that we can do, but students still need to recall and reuse information over and over again in different ways. Also , it helps those students that have a more visual memory.  

This week we have used Explain Everything to " explain" the  best or favorite strategy to multiply. Students have come up with very neat creations that showcased their understanding. I am delighted to see how easy they upload the work to "Kidblog" from the iPads. They are doing it like "pros" and in a matter of minutes, all the videos are posted on their blogs. I do not have to do anything apart from revising ll of them, of course. Over the last few weeks much has been said about the use of iPads in the classroom and I always say, it is about the content, what you do with the technology, not about using tech for the sake of it. And today I have a very good reason that proves it.  I have seen how a student that hardly ever speaks Spanish in my classroom, explained a math strategy in the foreign language through a video. Maybe she feels less pressure to talk to a device, she was able to take all the time she needed without peer pressure, she was more

I realized I was doing "appsmashing" ( combining two or more apps in one activity) when I went to iPad summit in Boston in November 2013. Until then, I thought it was just playing with apps. But the plain truth is that combining apps to make a project is just a natural process when the goal is the project and not the technology. My students have been creating stories based on a leaf animal. Some chose to write in English, others chose to write it in Spanish. Then they created a digital version of the story using the Puppet Pals app. Their stories were displayed on a bulletin board but I wanted to share those digital stories with parents in the conferences, and here is where Augmented Reality comes to play.    We used Aurasma to create the AR. It was much easier than they thought it would be. The first thing they needed to create was the "overlay" and it was already done: the videos with the stories. They just needed then the trigger image. In this case,