Technology in Education: Notes from the Closet

What do kids love to talk about most?  Themselves, of course! Recently I had an opportunity to collaborate with a 2nd grade teacher, Ms. Moore .  In the beginning of the school year the students are still getting to know their classmates and their teacher.  Ms. Moore had the idea organized and knew what she wanted the students to do on paper but the technology was open for suggestion.  We talked about iPad apps that would be easy to use for incoming 2nd grade students that would allow them to record audio with their images.  While my preference is Educreations  we decided to use ShowMe since it was already loaded on the iPads at Coonley. Students began by filling out a graphic organizer with the following specific prompts: write your name in a creative way and take a picture of it capture your reflection in an unusual way through a picture spell a word that is meaningful to you with objects or people and take a picture take a picture of something t...

Update! Back in May 2013 I used  Teach Your Monster to Read  with a group of two kindergarten classrooms. The program was a success and I blogged about the ease of use for educators and the enjoyment of the students involved ( see original post ).  Since then I have relocated to a new school within my district and have had the opportunity to introduce the program to eight classrooms at the kindergarten and first grade levels.  The response has been overwhelmingly positive!  Many features of this program have remained the same as written in my post below but there have been some additional updates that have made the product even better. The Same (but still fantastic) Game 1: First Steps  is focused on helping students develop speed and accuracy of letter recognition. The game contains 8 islands each with 4 graphemes to focus on.  Students practice these sounds in different game settings and the islands of sounds must be completed in ...

This year a new class for our students was technology.  In previous years students had never had a dedicated technology "prep"; they would enter with their teacher and do assignments the teacher had requested. Our little ones loved coming to technology!  We would often start lessons that involved learning how to use Microsoft Word and eventually PowerPoint. Examples of some of their work can be found here ,  here , and  here . Preparation periods for teachers were 60 minutes this year.  Students did a great job with the assignments but I also wanted them to have some "downtime" in lab, albeit appropriate downtime.  To aid in this I created papers with websites that the students were allowed to explore.  Some are free, some required me to set up accounts.  Each was introduced one at a time and built up throughout lab.  Below are the papers.  You'll notice that many contain the same sites throughout the three grades but all three are emb...

Original Post (see my updated post here ) I’m always on the lookout for great sites to use with students, especially the little ones.  Our students have never had “formal” technology classes and the kindergarten students had never even entered the lab.  Finding sites that are age appropriate and educational can be challenging.  “ Teach Your Monster to Read ” is a site I stumbled upon one day here .  This site, based out of the U.K. teaches beginning readers about sound and letter matching as well as blending sounds together to form words.  It uses the context of monsters going on an adventure to different magical islands (eight islands in all).  On each island there are four mini lessons that works on accuracy and speed of letter recognition. Students must complete the game sequentially.  When logged off the next time they log back in the program remembers where they were previously so they don’t have to start over.  One of the best feat...