iPad
Pine Glen 5th Graders Share at Edcamp Boston
01 week ago
Mrs. D’Elia and I were thrilled to have five of our great fifth graders attend Edcamp Boston this year to share their experiences in 1:1 iPad classrooms. The event was attended by over 200 educators from across New England and New Jersey, and the students spoke before a group of 50 educators who asked them some very tough questions about how they handle working on the iPad and what they liked or didn’t like about it. It was an amazing experience, and they made us incredibly proud. Thank you so much to Ashlyn, Dilan, Judy, Kenan, and Sammy, as well as their parents, for joining us on Saturday!
See the Storify below to see pictures of the students in action and the reactions of all of the educators who saw them!
Creating Graphic Novels in First Grade
01 month ago
Over the last couple of weeks, the LTC has been working with first grade to create their very own comics! We were looking for just the right project to work on with Mrs. Hayes when she heard all about our new graphic novel collection. She knew that the graphic novels would fit in great with her ELA class’s learning about the parts of a story. So we came up with a plan to use the iPads to make some great comics.
We started off by doing some dramatic interpretations of Elephant & Piggie books by Mo Willems to demonstrate the use of dialogue and speech bubbles to tell a story. Then Mrs. D’Elia spent some more time over the next few days introducing students to the graphic novels in our collection and exploring graphic novels on the web site The Professor Garfield TOON Book Reader. We learned new storytelling features such as panels, speech bubbles, and facial expressions. After discussing the parts of a story, students started to develop their comic strips which would include characters, a setting, a problem, and a solution to the problem. At first we thought we would simplify things by making the comic strips limited to 4 panels, but the students had so much to write that we let them choose their number of panels.
After outlining their ideas and then creating rough drafts on paper, we got to create our pictures on the iPad. The art tool of choice at Pine Glen is Drawing Pad, an excellent Elementary-level art creation tool, and one of our Core iPad Apps. Our art teacher, Miss Fallon, was on hand to help the students realize their vision of what they wanted in their panels, making sure they had good details but still left room for the speech bubbles.
Once students created their panels, it was time to make them into comics! We used the Strip Designer app on the iPad to choose our page layouts and add speech bubbles and sound effects. You can see the completed comic book embedded below.
Presentation for iCon 2013
02 months ago
We were happy to have a chance to lead a conversation this weekend at iCon 2013, hosted by BPS at Marshall Simonds Middle School. Our discussion was focused around the problems that surface when implementing a 1:1 technology program and how we’ve handled them. Here are the slides we used to lead this conversation.
Demonstrating nonfiction text features
03 months ago
I recently had the chance to work with Ms. Marcus‘ 5th grade ELA class on creating some books. But not just any books! We created nonfiction books about nonfiction text features using those very same text features. This was a great chance for students to show what they know about the different kinds of text features.
Students were given a list of text features they had to include in their book, as well as some optional ones to choose from in order to fill out their books. They were tasked with creating their books in Book Creator, and they were supposed to use the features they were learning about in the books as much as they could. Students first went on a scavenger hunt for the text features in a variety of nonfiction books, taking pictures of them using their iPad’s camera. They then imported the pictures into Book Creator, where they also were able to design their pages and lay out their text the way they wanted to. Here’s a couple of examples:
Book Creator is one of Pine Glen’s core apps! It’s in heavy use currently in several 5th grade projects, and will be used for an upcoming project in 2nd grade.
You can download all of the books the here!
Introducing our Core iPad Apps Page!
05 months ago
Whether you’re a teacher looking for powerful ways to take advantage of the iPad in your classroom or a parent looking for some great, creative apps to use on the new iPad your family is getting for the holidays, we’ve got you covered with our new Core iPad Apps page!
What makes a core app?
Here in the LTC, we work with teachers from all grade levels in all subject areas. In order for us to consider something one of our core iPad apps, it has to be something that we’ve determined has significant value for many classroom situations. While there are many wonderful apps for learning math facts, those apps are of limited utility to just math facts. We have some social studies games we love, but they’re still just limited to learning about social studies. the ideal core app, on the other hand , should be useful throughout the school day in different contexts. These are the apps that are on almost every iPad in Pine Glen.
We’ve started the page off with apps split up into a few categories. Go to our Core iPad Apps page to learn about which apps we’re using as for student response systems, writing, note-taking, movie-making, screencasting, audio recording, image manipulation, and data collection.
This page can be permanently found under the For Teachers tab at the top of the blog.
