Createch-ing

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

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

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,

In the middle of the frenetic report card period, I had an a-ha moment today and I just had to share it. Every end of the week I usually create a big paper chart with assignments due and students' names so that they can check them off when they are done. That is nothing new, I know, but here comes Evernote and it's magic checklists. I created a basic checklist with students' names and four basic tasks , that I change depending on what I am doing. Today was just one of those busy days with a trillion tasks to finish and that every student is at a different stage. One of those days that they come to you to ask what's next at least three times because they have to finish little activities that are done in minutes.  So I gathered them up, opened on of my class checklists on Evernote, changed the headings for my tasks at hand, and ask the students to make a checkmark every time they finished a task using my funny hand(which they love to play with). It was like magic words

Last week I tried using "Aurasma" in the iPads. Aurasma is an augmented reality app that uses a trigger image to show a 3d object, video or whatever you want to appear. My goal was to make a worksheet alive. As we work in a bilingual setting and we teach math in spanish, explanations are very visual but not all the students pick it up at the beginning. Some of them need further explanation, of course , whether it is their mother language or not. But I was thinking about homework and that moment when you are trying to recall an explanation but you do not remember exactly what the teacher said. And here is when the "virtual teacher" in a form of video appears when you put the iPad over the worksheet.  The application could seem very complicated , but in fact, it was easy to deal with since it guides you al l the time. You can create use one aura form the database, but I created my own one. I first did a video using "Doceri" explaining the