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

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,

Created with Padlet

I presented yesterday at SLIC Conference 2013 "iPads for bilingual education" in Canmore, Alberta. There was a lot of interest in the topic. It seems many schools are planning on purchasing iPads and teachers want to be prepared to know how to use them in a purposeful way.  This is a graphic that shows iPad content creation according to Blooms' Taxonomy. The creation would be the higher order thinking skill according to this classification.  All the stages are interconnected and according to the revised Bloom's taxonomy, they do not have to happen in a  determined order. But creation would be the most complex one. I advocate for the use of iPads as a tool, not as an end or as a repository of apps that substitutes teaching/learning time or that is understood as solely a game tool. I believe it is the task that generates the app, and not the other way round.We first need to think what do we want to do with our class, and then, think of the app that coul

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