From 1 iPad to 20 iPads and How It Has Changed My Classroom

I was challenged to improve my students’ vocabulary and sight word recognition with one iPad in the Fall of 2011. My students were amazingly successful and we only used 4 skill building apps. This minor success developed into a written proposal for 20 more iPads, a MacBook and an iPad cart. Our proposal was fulfilled and we received all of the technology in May of 2012. Skill building has developed into knowledge building through the use of applications...

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Non Fiction Riddles, Video, and the Explain Everything App

Yesterday, my students and I started a discussion about eggs because we are doing a collaborative project about dying eggs naturally Click here to see the project. The discussion morphed into questions regarding which animals hatch from eggs. I pulled out a bunch of pictures of animals and poof, our inquiry was born.   I then spread out the different pictures of animals and on purple construction paper, I scribbled down the headings yes, no...

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Using Explain Everything in the Primary Classroom

Explain everything is a screen casting and interactive whiteboard app that lets you annotate, animate, narrate, import, and export almost anything to and from almost anywhere.  My students can export their video to our dropbox folder to save it, to our youtube channel to share it and to the camera roll to easily upload to their kidblogs all with a touch of a button.  My grade 1/2 students can easily do all of these functions independently....

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Primary Blogging Community - April edition

I have had a lot of questions pertaining to the Primary Blogging Community.  Hopefully this post will clear up some of the questions for you. What is the Primary Blogging Community? The PBC is a community of primary teachers that want to share their students' learning via their classroom blog and their students' personal blogs.  Classrooms will be grouped with 3 or 4 other classrooms from around the globe.  The program is 8 weeks...

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Cross Country Creature Collaboration Project

I am super excited to announce our next collaborative project.  This project has been on the back burner for months now, and we are finally ready to begin. Sarah Soltauheller and I have done many collaborative projects with our classes over the past 2 years, and I think this one is the most exciting!  We wanted the project to incorporate writing, science and social studies.  We also wanted there to be an authentic audience for our...

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The Pocket Zoo App

I am preparing for my literacy stations the week we get back (we have our break next week).  My students are addicted to live animal web cams.  I have created QR codes for the students to scan around the room and when they get a free moment they can scan the QR codes and see different live web cams.  I wanted to create a Research and Discovery station, where the students pick a webcam to view and make observations of the animal....

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iPad Animal Inquiry Project

This year the educators at my school are focusing on impacting our students' writing through the use of non-fiction writing strategies and embedding conversations on metacognition to influence our students self efficacy as learners at my school. Inquiry based learning is a perfect way to practice non fiction strategies and encourage metacognitive conversations. My class is not a stranger to inquiry based learning.  We have done many inquiry...

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Adding Some "Genius" To My Free Choice Friday

I have a classroom that offers a lot of choices and freedoms.  Chances are, on any given time or day if you were to walk into my classroom, my students are never working on the same task and if they are, they are making their learning visible in different ways.  My students have their own personal work space, however they also are free to sit anywhere in the room and in our Learning Commons next to us.  Sometimes my students need a quiet space to record something, and sometimes they need a space where they can collaborate with their...

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