Keep Your Fingers Crossed!

Today Mrs. Belanger, Mrs. Galvan and myself sent in an entry for a technology story contest.  If we win, we will be awarded $5000.00 to spend on technology in our classroom.  That would amount to quite a few new iPads!  We decided to write about our iPad inquiry project and about Destinee.  Keep your fingers crossed, we will be hearing sometime in April. ...

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Using The Show Me App on the iPads in Math

We have started a new action research project involving the iPads.  We want to see if using the Show Me App will increase creativity and higher order thinking when solving word problems.  The students are given an open ended problem to do in their math journals, while the iPad group (2 girls and 2 boys) are given the iPads to record and playback their finding to the problem.  The problem today was: MaCayla found frogs in the pond. Some were green and some were brown. How many green frogs did she find? How many brown frogs did...

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Grade 1 iPad Inquiry Project

Student NeedIn November, 39% of the students in grade 1 scored in the yellow or red on the DRA test.  We found that many of the students knew few or no sight words.  We were searching for an answer that would help us fill this gap in student learning.  We thought that the Apple iPad would be a tool that may be able to help us by guiding student learning, offer instant feedback and allowing student led, collaborative learning.Overview...

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Using iPads in the classroom

This past week the students wrote non fiction paragraphs on penguins.  We then used an iPad app called Book Creator.  The students were able to record themselves reading their paragraph and then I took a photograph of them and their finished piece of writing.  This was a great way for the students to hear how fluent they are in their reading.  We will be working on fluency using the iPads in the next week.  Students will...

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100th Day of School and Valentine's Day

It was a very busy day in grade 1 today!  The students and I decided to try to tweet 100 tweets about things we love in honour of our 100th day of school.  I am proud to say we accomplished and surpassed our goal!  There are over 200 tweets under the hash tag #vd100 (Valentine's Day 100).  We had classes and or people responding from Guatemala, Nebraska, British Columbia, Texas and California to our tweets.  The students...

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Using Technology In Our Classroom

I'm sure your child has been telling you about all the great things we have been doing in the classroom. The students have been independently using the smart board during math stations and literacy centers. The students have also been using the laptops daily to post on their blogs or to work on raz kids. Lastly, the students have been using the iPads to tweet on twitter, work on sight words, work on math problem solving and have been making their own stories on puppet pals. Mrs. Belanger and I are working hard to help our students critique and...

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