Createch-ing

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,