QR codes as math review center work~ Mrs. Cowell

Thursday, April 17, 2014... Overall, this was a very successful lesson... especially when you consider that we worked on this the day before vacation!

 The students got to review 6 major focus areas in math while working in small groups and having access to all of the center materials via QR codes. The students were able to solve the problems at each center and check immediately to see if they got the right answer or not. I was very impressed with how quickly they were able to figure out the QR codes at each center. 

One glitch- one of the centers that I used had a website that the students could not access from the iPad for some reason. I had an extra backup center that I was able to substitute in its place, though.

The best part of our day... students teaching teachers! 

Mrs. Lowerre and Ms. Pastore were able to sneak in for a quick tutorial on how to use the QR codes.

Today's Meet: Not Your Average Reading Discussion! (Mrs. Bars)

My students have completed their iPad Permit tests using Socrative, filmed and directed thoughtful and fun skits for their independently designed "Top 10 iPad Rules for Room 5" and we are ready to dive right in!

For our first experience with using the iPads as a curriculum tool I wanted to focus on ELA. We are currently reading Tuck Everlasting which has a heavy theme that promotes deep thinking on the part of students. However, as we all know it can be a challenge to push all students to participate in discussion and feel comfortable doing so. So, that's where Today's Meet came in…

Students navigated their way to the Today's Meet link I had previously created for this chapter and we began by discussing the format and collaboratively came up with some ground rules. I was really impressed by how much they already knew about character limits for venues such as this or twitter! The most important ground rule we set was about posting appropriate and related content on Today's Meet. For our first time using Today's Meet I provided students with a lot of structure, allowing them to only "say" thinking that is related to the prompts I had provided them. We began by jig sawing preview vocabulary for the chapter we were going to read that day. Students would be posting sentences full of context clues to hint at the words meaning. This is an activity we do often in class (with pencil and paper) so it was helpful that they already knew the drill for our first time using Today's Meet. Groups shared their vocabulary and we were all able to follow along and discuss each contribution on the feed.

Next we practiced our "iPads down" skills! I anticipated a challenge in asking students (especially of this age) to transition from using the iPad to putting it to sleep and turning it over to read a chapter of our book. However, they were GREAT about the transition and were seemingly really motivated to follow the iPad rules they had previously been a part of creating.

We went back to Today's Meet after reading chapter 18, which has an awesome cliff hanger, and students were given time to independently post, or "say" as Today's Meet calls it, their predictions for chapter 19.

It was an incredible experience to watch how motivated my students were to post their thinking on Today's Meet and I loved watching them read and react to their peer's predictions on the feed. Overall, I found using this in the classroom as a discussion tool to be valuable. After the lesson, we debriefed as a class about the pros and cons of using Today's Meet and I received the following feedback from my kiddos :

• it allowed students who are shy to share their ideas
• when we shared our vocabulary sentences, if I couldn't hear the person it was OK because I could see what they wrote
• typing on the iPad is the opposite of what you teach us to do on computers and we need to "peck" more so the outside of our hands don't hit the return button and accidents post things we aren't ready to post ( I hadn't though of this, great point!)
• only having a certain amount of characters to use makes you think more about what you are going to write

Observations from the iPad Classroom

I had the pleasure of co-teaching an introductory iPad lesson in Mrs. Cowell's classroom last week and I wanted to share what I saw:

• Students are very eager to get their hands on the iPads.  At the same time they are respectful of the device and how it should be handled and taken care of.
• Students took ownership of the devices since they came up with rules on how to use them. Rather than just writing down these rules, students came up with skits and acted out their 'rules'.  As Mrs. Cowell noted in her post, students had to think critically about what is important when filming skits like these (volume, length of recording, looking at the camera, speaking slowly, etc).
• Students were quite adept at the technology; at the end of the lesson we asked students to upload their videos to Youtube (a private channel) which they did without a hitch.  We also learned that using AirDrop is not ideal when there are many videos (some lengthy) that need to get sent to the teacher.
• Students are engaged when using the iPad, even for a formal assessment.  Mrs. Cowell gave the students a quiz using Socrative (a student response system).  Walking around the room, I could see that students were on task.  I think it is also helpful for students who get anxious during quizzes to only see one question on a page.

• It's ok to trust the students with these devices.  After completing our lessons we asked 5 students to carry 4 or 5 ipads apiece down the stairs.  We gave them a brief tutorial on the best way to put the devices back in the charging cart.  Our leap of faith was well-rewarded.  Students learned to put the iPads in the correct slots; when they made mistakes they were able to troubleshoot and make things rights.  

While we have had minor bumps in the road so far, the students have been excellent when it comes to using the devices.  Right now we have only used the web browser and camera.  As we move into more exciting uses, student engagement and learning will only increase exponentially.