Apps I Use

Help Wanted

/ Kristi Meeuwse / 1 Comment

We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone.-Ronald Reagan

Ella

Ella

I recently found myself in a situation where I didn’t know how to do something with one of our new apps.  I could have probably figured it out if I devoted all of my attention and time to it but knew there was someone who already knew just how to do it.  So rather than spend precious time trying to figure it out, I just went to Ella. Ella is an expert at figuring things out on the iPad.  She never lets me down and if she doesn’t know the answer right away, she persists and comes back to me, usually 10.4 seconds later with the answer.  We all need an Ella…she is like a real-life Siri, only way cuter.

Working together as a community of learners benefits everyone.  Today, my class partnered with a second grade class to demonstrate how to use an app.  The second grade class had just gotten Explain K and 2 largeEverything which is an app my kids are already familiar with. It was a great activity watching 5 year olds teaching 7 and 8 year olds.  My kids were very nonchalant about the whole thing…like it is no big deal to teach older kids, because to them it’s not.  Even better, was the second graders didn’t seem to mind being taught by the younger children.  Once again, there were 50 kids in my classroom and all were engaged and on task.

How do we create an environment where teachers learn from students and students learn from each other, regardless of their age?  We allow the experts to share what they know.  The students in my class know which child in my class can help them with a variety of needs.  Everyone has their own area of expertise.  Students are engaged in a way that provokes conversation.  Students are invested in their learning because they are able to make choices about how they learn.  The adults don’t have to always be in charge and they recognize that students have a lot to offer, even if they are 5 years old.  The learner knows it is ok to make mistakes and the teacher gives the children the opportunity to create…surprise me!

My kindergarten students have many years before they enter college and then the job market.  They have much to learn in the coming years.  They also need to learn how to work with people both younger and older than themselves.  Working cooperatively with peers, and eventually co-workers is a critical life skill.  Today’s teacher doesn’t have to have all the answers.  We just need to be able to ask an expert…even if that expert still needs a booster seat 🙂

Hope helps 2nd grade

Today, we will do exciting new things.  Let’s get to it!

Hope Explains More

/ Kristi Meeuwse / 2 Comments

hom·o·phone : a word pronounced the same as another but differing in meaning, whether spelled the same way or not, as heir  and air.

If you want a sure-fire way to make a class of kindergarten students laugh you need only say “underwear”, “poop” or “naked”.  This will result in uncontrolled, hysterical whooping and laughing.  We recently added the sight word “but” to our list and that immediately created some wide eyes and giggling.  I had added a “bad word” to our list.  What was I thinking?

We immediately launched into a lesson on homophones. This is a complicated concept for my students because they don’t realize words can sound the same but be spelled differently and mean different things.  We came up with a few together on an anchor chart to help them visualize this.  We will add to this as we come across other words, hopefully not as scandalous as “but” and “butt”.

These class conversations combined with the anchor charts help them make concrete connections to otherwise nebulous concepts.  My students are not experts on homophones now, but they have been exposed to the concept and hopefully, with the creation of the anchor chart, it will cause them to stop and think when confronted with another word that is confusing.

In a recent post, I extolled the virtues of our Explain Everything app. One of my students, Hope, was very articulate in her explanation of her annotated illustration.  Hope was vexed by the whole “but” “butt” issue and wanted to Explain Everything about these words that was creating such consternation in our classroom.  Please allow Hope to explain more:

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Increasing Math Literacy with iPads

/ Kristi Meeuwse / 1 Comment

Mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance, harmony, logic, and abstract beauty.-Deepak Chopra

Math and I don’t get along.  While we are civil out of necessity, I make it a practice not to do math in public.  It just never turns out well. I think our disharmony can be traced back to the early beginnings of our relationship when my second grade teacher would smack our knuckles with a ruler if we used our fingers when adding.  I was terrified of her and I soon became terrified of math.  It’s been a rocky road ever since.

So how ironic that my 100th blog post (insert big fanfare here!) is about math.  I don’t want my students to be afraid of math, nor do I want them to share the same ambivalent feelings I have.

ella tens and onesOur common core math standard this week is “I can break numbers in to tens and ones.”  We’ve unpacked that standard all week.  We’ve practiced and practiced and today was the day they demonstrated their proficiency.  First, we chose four teen numbers.  They drew their tens frame in Doodle Buddy and showed the ones outside the frame.  After the drawing was saved, they imported it into Pic Collage and typed out their breakdown of the number into tens and ones.  This one to the left is Ella’s.  She has extended our valentines theme in her tens frame.

I’ve mentioned before how we are focusing on workflow fluency. As my students save their Pic Collage to their camera roll, I can transfer it to my laptop with Simple Transfer.  This allows me to keep electronic work portfolios.  You could also add this Pic Collage to Explain Everything and the children could tell all about their thinking.  Wells Tens and OnesIn Wells’ example to the right, he chose to draw some of his and use the stickers in Pic Collage for others.

Mathematical thinking supports science, technology and mathematical literacy.  Having students demonstrate and be able to explain how they came to their conclusions is not only important in math, but any problem solving activity.

As we have recently celebrated and counted up to the 100th day of school, we are exposing our students to greater numbers.  Having spent the week on tens and ones, they are already asking me about what the “1” in 100 means if their are zero tens and zero ones.  Time to move the bar up a notch and explore hundreds.

My students loved this activity and it is definitely one you can “count” on me using again!

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Let’s Get Creative With Educreations

/ Kristi Meeuwse / 4 Comments

  In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it. -Rose Tremain

With only 74 days of school remaining in this year, (wow, that totally seems like I’m counting) I’m feeling the urge to mix things up a bit and try some different things.  I’m a self-confessed organization evangelist and I don’t like messy things (no glitter, ever).  I’m also a big planner and to-do list person.  Call it our ridiculously warm winter this year or perhaps early, early spring, but I’m up for a bit of whimsy.  A bit of spontaneity.

unpacked standardsThis week, our unpacked standard in math, is addition is putting things together and subtraction is taking things apart.  Another kindergarten teacher and I thought it would be fun to put 2 groups of our children together and let them come up with a number story with a partner from the other class.  They would plan together and write it out on paper first.  The partners would decide if it was an addition story or a subtraction story first, then they would decide what object(s) would be used in the number story.  One of the stories went like this: We had 4 flowers.  We gave 2 flowers away.  We had 2 flowers left.

After the story was written out and illustrated on paper, the pair opened their Educreations app.  Educreations is a free interactive whiteboard for iPad. Students can create a video tutorial, record and play their voice, add photos from the camera or their own drawings,  and can animate their images by dragging them around the screen while recording.  planningEach pair of students, decided who would read the story problem first and who would illustrate the story problem while it was being read.  Then they reversed roles and recorded it on the other student’s iPad.  This way both students had their work to show.

My planning only went as far as the partners working on the story problems together and then recording. These students took this assignment and ran with it.  The partners came up with great story problem ideas and did a wonderful job collaborating and taking turns. They loved taking turns and putting the story problem on each iPad.  I’ve mentioned how much they love to talk!

This app has so many possibilities and is so easy to use.  I can even create lessons on the app and have students watch it as needed to work on a skill.  Lessons can be shared via email, Facebook and Twitter if needed.  By having a target plan in place, but allowing the students to take charge and turn it into their own, I find the results usually far exceed even my high expectations…and THAT is definitely a happy ending!

boys planning

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For the Love of Words…

/ Kristi Meeuwse / 4 Comments

The limits of my language are the limits of my universe-Goethe

Kaylee vocabWe are at the point in the school year where my students are able to read most of their sight words and are able to decode many others.  As we flex our thinking muscles, we are working on increasing vocabulary words.

Students learn vocabulary words informally when they are immersed in a word rich environment. Anchor charts with rich words and lists of synonyms can be used to create a word rich environment. Students learn new words through rich conversations, personal reading and daily experiences with read aloud texts.

We are working to increase our Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary during literacy centers.  Students are given 4 vocabulary words that go along with our thematic unit.  In the example above, the words were love, heart, friend and valentine.  The children had to write a sentence in Pic Collage to show they understood the word and then they illustrated their sentence in Doodle Buddy and imported it into the Pic Collage.  They will also be allowed to look for pictures on Safari to demonstrate words soon.  (I was a little hesitant to have them look up images for valentines words…) After they created their Pic Collage, they shared it with their team and read the sentences of the other children.  A colleague of mine uses Strip Designer with her first graders to demonstrate their vocabulary words.  Either of these apps work great.  You can save the work to the photo library or upload to PaperPort to demonstrate workflow.

To teach vocabulary, we must use rich and robust instruction through multiple exposures. Children who acquire a substantial vocabulary are often able to think more deeply, express themselves better, and learn new things more quickly. They are also very likely to be successful not only learning to read, but also in reading at or above grade level throughout their school years.

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Hope Explains Everything on iPad

/ Kristi Meeuwse / 8 Comments

Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them. -Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Have you ever listened to a 5 year old tell about their work? Try listening to 25 of them.  Daily.  They have so much they want to tell and explain that I don’t have enough ears to listen to it all.  Their work is so detailed and there are like 40 bajillion things they absolutely must tell, and if you interrupt them even once, they must.  start.  over.

Hope

Hope

Thank goodness I have Explain Everything.  It is the perfect app for my kids to demonstrate their workflow, show me what they have learned and talk, talk, talk to their hearts content.  If they mess up, they just erase and start over.  My kids are learning about labeling and annotating their work.  Scientists label and good readers annotate for meaning.  When I showed them the app, someone said, “You mean I can just tell my iPad everything I want it to know?”  Yes…within 13.8 GB of reason.  So with full permission to illustrate, write, label, annotate AND talk, this lesson was a home run. There is an example from Hope, one of my students at the end of this post.

Ok…so a small caveat.  I have a slight obsession with neat and orderly and it’s hard for me to do messy.  (Yes, I realize I teach kindergarten.  Somehow it all works.)  This activity can get messy.  I had to get over my urge to tidy it up and put it all in a bento box and say that’s, that. You can’t have kids recording all over the classroom while other kids are talking and recording at the same time.  So, as kids finished their illustrations, labeling and annotations, I allowed 4 at a time to go out in the hall, spread themselves out, and tell their story.  I actually had to tell them it was ok to speak up so they could be heard by the recorder.

We will be using this approach with demonstrating mastery of math standards as well in the coming weeks.  Explain Everything is not free…There are other apps, like Show Me that does similar things that is free.

As my kids are working on many different kinds of fluencies, stretching their cognitive wings and needing to share what they’ve learned, having the iPad allows my kids to create, produce, redefine and transform all in one place.

Please allow Hope to Explain Everything:

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Workflow and iPads

/ Kristi Meeuwse / 2 Comments

Don’t mistake activity for achievement.-John Wooden

boys workingIn a recent post, I wrote about moving beyond apps and concentrating your focus on content. What are your students learning, why are they learning it and how will they know they’ve learned it? As I unpack the common core standards with my students, I am focusing heavily on these questions…not so that I can answer them, but so that they can answer them.  With these questions in place and iPads in hand, we need to look beyond apps and instead focus on workflow fluency.

If you look up the definition of workflow, you find:

  1. The flow or progress of work done by a company, industry, department, or person.
  2. The rate at which such flow or progress takes place.

The flow of progress…how can my students demonstrate the flow of progress?  Just because they are interacting with an app does not mean they are learning.  iPad activity should be purposeful and connected.  It should also be personalized to what that particular child needs.  

Workflow and iPads allow students to redefine their work.  The technology allows for the creation of new tasks previously inconceivable.  It is transformative.  After our recent thematic unit on penguins, my students created their own books in Book Creator. workflowThis started with their own illustrations in Doodle Buddy which were imported into their book in Book Creator.  The students wrote sentences to go with their own illustrations.  Taking this a little further, students took some of their individual illustrations and labeled them using Explain Everything. They were able to record themselves explaining their work.  While the apps I used in this are great, there are others that do similar things.  Some of them are free.  Pic Collage is another way to demonstrate workflow and it’s free. The take away here is that students are able to use the iPad to demonstrate what they’ve learned and can use apps to explain in their own words what they’ve learned.

As we are striving to make learning more personal, we should teach our students about workflow fluency. By using the iPad to demonstrate workflow, our students are engaged, thinking critically, and are using skills of a 21st century learner.  Even the youngest among us can do it.

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Kids Teaching Kids with Book Creator

/ Kristi Meeuwse / 20 Comments

collageKnowledge exists to be imparted.-Ralph Waldo Emerson

For a short time, I considered that it was highly possible I had lost my mind.  I was going to teach my kids how to use Book Creator on a Friday. Not only that, they were going to teach another kindergarten class how to use it later in the day.  Simmer down…my sanity is still intact.  I worried needlessly.  My iPad proficient five year olds created a 4 page book on Penguins in less than an hour.  They illustrated their pictures in Doodle Buddy, saved them to the camera roll, imported them into Book Creator, typed their text and exported the book to their iBooks app in the morning.  I demonstrated how to do this on the SmartBoard prior to their starting on their own.

In the afternoon, we hosted another kindergarten class to come learn from us.  At one penguin bookspoint, there were 50 kids in my classroom.  They were in groups of 2 or 4, working together.  By the end of our session, the other class had at least the book cover completed and some had their first page finished.  My children loved, loved, loved teaching them.  The engagement was instant.  Their conversations were instructive, relevant, and meaningful.  There were conversations about word choice and details in illustrations.  We even discussed getting back together and sharing our finished books with each other.

My students, in the end, wanted to know if they could show another class how to create their own books.  What a great way for all of my students to have an opportunity to be a leader.  Even the quiet and reserved students, who may otherwise be reluctant to share in front of the group, took a leadership role in the small groups.  While the finished products are going to look great, the process in getting there was priceless.  Not to be forgotten, the science facts they acquired as they wrote about penguins, their life cycle, and their habitats.  Combine that with the literacy aspect and the cooperative learning on the iPads, and I’d say today was a complete success.

Here is a screen shot of one of the book covers:

book cover

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Personalized Learning: Spelling

/ Kristi Meeuwse / 3 Comments

“Don’t they teach you how to spell these days?” “No, they teach us how to use spell check.” -Jodi Picoult

I have to confess…I am one of those people who never had trouble with spelling.  It came easily for me and my nickname in middle school was “dictionary”.  I hated that then, but having the ability to spell has always served me well.  In this “spell check” world, it seems as if spelling may not matter.

Fortunately, my 5 year olds have some of the same desire for spelling correctly as I.  They don’t like to get things wrong and they get concerned when they are typing in Pages and they get the red, squiggly underline indicating they have spelled incorrectly.

Since we are focusing on personalized learning, I have different spelling lists for different groups in the class.  We are working on word family words mostly at this point.  Spell Test is a free (for now) app that is very basic and simple but provides me a helping hand in managing different spelling lists and tests.

How does Spelling Test work
1. Create a Spelling Test
2. Choose a Name for Your Test.
3. Start by adding Words to your test.
4. Record your own Pronunciations in an easy to use format.
5. Now Take a Test.
6. Listen to the Pronunciation and Spell the Word in the Box correctly.
7. Instant Feedback on how you did, Did you get that right or wrong
8. Complete the Test to see a Summary of Words.
9. Each time you take a test, you will know which words you got right and which you got wrong
10. Track improvements as you take the test multiple times.

The kids like using their own voice to record the words.  I can also record words if pronunciation is an issue.  The app doesn’t show them the words during the test.

This is an easy way to personalize spelling for each child.  I’m not ready to give up to spell check completely.  I still see value in teaching words, word roots, and phonics.  Practicing with an app makes it fun for the kids, but it also allows me to individualize each list if necessary. Because it is an app that is available for iPhone and iPad, parents can also have students use it at home to practice.

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Creating Writers

/ Kristi Meeuwse / 6 Comments

In creating, the only hard thing is to begin; a grass-blade’s no easier to make than an oak. -James Russell Lowell

As a writer, sitting in front of a blank screen with a blinking cursor mocking the emptiness of the page, Lowell’s quote hits home.  I often have no idea where my writing is going until I begin.  Often, it goes in directions surprising even to me.  That “aha” moment…the one when you have clarity, direction, and purpose is utterly inspiring.

My students are working on making a book using the Scribble Press App.  This is our first attempt at book making with this app.  They love all of the choices of tools this app provides.  Even though it is January, my students need me to model the process.  I model the think-aloud process of deciding what to write about and I even model being stuck.  I sit in front of the blank iPad screen and think….and think some more.  I model starting out with writing about one topic and then deciding to discard that idea and go in a different direction.  I model not finishing in one sitting.  They need to see this process and learn how to work through the “not knowing”.  We are all about instant gratification…we have to learn to process, think, and wait.

Their books are a work in progress.  I am hoping they will finish by the end of this week.  The end product, however, is not the important part.  It is what is learned in the getting there.  They are fussing over fonts, color and illustrations.  They are grappling with word choice, sounding out those words, and very emergent keyboarding skills on their iPads.  The Common Core standards emphasize three anchor standards for writing:  argument, informational, and narrative.  Human beings grow up on narratives, on stories.  We live our lives hearing stories and telling them.  We plan and daydream and work and worry in narrative.  How important then, is it to spend valuable time in this genre?

As tempting as it is at times, to rush through to get something done, allowing our students to sit and stew, think, plan, erase and start again is critical to growth in writing.  We have to set the stage, model and allow time-protected time-for genius to develop.

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