Over the past few weeks, students in 4th grade have been writing iBooks using the app Book Creator. This app has so many features, including the ability to open finished books in the iBooks app. However, this time we took it one step farther. Students (with parent permission, of course) had the option to try and publish their finished creations to the actual iBook store. The story, Wolves Win the Game, was the first to be accepted. Check it out! Wolves Win the Game
Mrs. Pollock’s Guidance classes in third and fourth grade at Glenvar have been role playing bullying situations by using the app Sock Puppets. In Third Grade, they practiced different strategies to get out of a bullying situation. In Fourth Grade, they practiced the importance of bystanders. Here are a few of their videos below:
Students in Mrs. Schirmer’s Fourth Grade reading class have been learning about the Iditarod. While the event started on Saturday, they’ve spent the past few weeks reading books and researching information about it. As part of their research, they created Musher Trading Cards using the Trading Cards iPad app by Read, Write, Think (you could use the website too). They gave each of their classmates a copy of the trading cards they made, and will watch these musher’s closely as the race progresses. Check out their cards below!
Students will be following the Iditarod at the official site: http://iditarod.com/ and plotting progress on the classroom map. Finally, they will skype with resident of Alaska to get first hand information about what it’s like to live there. More on that in another post!
Students in Ms. Barger’s fourth grade class just finished a huge unit on Famous Americans. As part of a STEM activity, students were responsible for writing a speech about a Famous American. They also had to create a poster to use in their speech with a pop-up and movable part.
As students were given speeches, I filmed them (on their assigned iPad). Students took notes when other students gave speeches. Then students watched their own speech and used a self-evaluation sheet to foster self-reflection. They used their notes and each other’s posters to create a Pic Collage containing three facts they learned from listening to other classmates’ speeches.
Students enjoyed the project, and it really gave ownership to giving speeches and listening to others. Both these skills are important Fourth Grade English SOLs.
Students in Mrs. Schlosser’s class used QR codes, iPads, and videos to explore Jamestown! It was an adaptation of the geocaching activity I did with students last year. This time, instead of finding boxes in the school yard with questions in them (it was way too cold), students scanned QR codes placed in the halls of the school. The QR codes asked questions, and students used videos loaded on the iPads from HistoryIsFun.org to answer them. We did learn it was important to spread the QR codes far enough a part so that student groups didn’t feel crowded by other groups. They all had fun and learned about Jamestown too!
Teaching with Technology 