Math apps

I lost my parent volunteer this week. I am teaching the struggling to achieve math students for 2nd and 3rd grade. I have them in a class which I focus on using learning targets and tools, standards based lessons, individual and small group instruction, and lots of progress monitoring. Needless to say, my students can be a bit difficult to handle and can be overwhelming. My parent volunteer got overwhelmed.

In any case, I then found myself with having to make a decision on how to make best use of my student's time. How to get small group instruction time in while the other students are engaged on learning? I turned to the itouches.

I already had students meeting on the netbooks for one station using a membership math site that provides field back student skill usage. I was hesistant to have students use another math site on the netbooks. Then I remembered the itouches. I set up a math groups on each itouch. I demonstrated how to find the math apps and how to use them for skill practice.

You know, I am sorry to lose the parent volunteer but it really was an effective way to support their math instruction.

grouping on the itouch

It can be simply overwhelming! There are so many great apps. I find myself downloading apps for math, reading, writing, videos, word study. There are webapps, and the built in apps, and the apps you purchase through itunes. And then you can bookmark websites. Pretty soon my classroom itouches are filled with four or five screens full.

Then I discovered you can group the apps. I simply drag the app onto another app and then create a group. I can label that group- for instance, money apps. Students can go to the group that fits the instructional focus. Grouping apps makes it easier for students to use.

Simplicity...

searching on the itouch

It's the little things that make me happy... like discovering the search feature on the itouch. Being able to search on the itouch made the itouches that much easier for my students to use.

I bought a rockstar belkin for my itouches so that students would be able to use it as a listening center. The belkin allows five students to hook up to one itouch and listen together. I downloaded CDs of audio versions of our books from our adopted curriculum and created a playlist. I carefully showed my students how to open the music app, find the audio books playlist I had created, search through the playlist to the book that they wanted to listen to and then push the play button. WHEW!!!!! A lot of work.

Then I discovered that the search feature works for searching for songs too! Slide to the left to pull up the search feature. Type in the first few letters of the book and BAM!!! There it is!

It's the littlest things that make me happy.

Cash Cow

Cash Cow is my students' favorite app for the itouch at this moment. They have been steadily playing the app since the beginning of school in September. Cash Cow supports students in learning to exchange money up to a dollar. They look for coin combinations that make a nickel, dime, quarter, and a dollar. Most students start out with making a nickel with five pennies or a dime with two nickels. The game progressively gets harder so that students have to make new combinations including two dimes and a nickel, four quarters, and other combinations of up to ten coins totaling $1. What I enjoy even more than their enthusiasm for playing the game (there is always a rush to the itouches), is the transfer of skills. Students are able to add real coins together with greater fluency. I have even seen students pull out the classroom coins and look for combinations when all of the itouches are being used by other students.

Itouches

I have been spending quite a bit of time with my itouches lately. We have five in our room, thanks to the Qwest grant. I am finding that they are very popular with my students and their accessibility makes them a perfect solution for the classroom. Last year, I purchased 14 netbooks through the Qwest grant. I love the netbooks. Their size and portability have been invaluable in my classroom. However, when we are looking for a grab and go kind of technology- the itouches are the thing we grab. Within seconds, students can have the itouches up and going and running their favorite program/app. And, they can do a lot of the same tasks on the itouch as the netbook. I am just beginning to explore their potential in the classroom. I expect to write a series of articles on my itouch discoveries.

Twiducate

I implemented twiducate as an experiment. I have been reflecting a lot about the blogs and how to use them more effectively and one of my thoughts was that the students were using the blogs for short messages rather than blog articles. So, I searched out some microblog platforms that I could experiment with. My goal was to implement short messages as a different genre and then refocus the blogs into a more indepth writing. Something like having students writing notes to each other and having them write essays about their learning. They are two different forms and you can model the differences when you show the effect on audience and purpose of the author for each form. Keeping in mind that my students are emergent and transitional literacy learners, both forms will be approximations. I have looked at several different microblog platforms. Here is my delicious link to other options: microblogs. Not sure why I chose twiducate except that it was extremely easy to use and implement. I did not provide a lot of instruction on how to use twiducate, rather I took the approach of seeing how they would use it.

I have always monitored the account for inappropriateness but had not really looked at it closely to evaluate the actual writing recently until today. I had to really chuckle at the ways they are using it. I had actually thought that the enthusiasm for twiducate would have died down. Surprisingly no. But interestingly, they have been conducting their own experiment on how to use this form, what to write to this audience, and questioning each other's purpose. Buttercup in particular has been calling the other students out on their purpose. Several students had been writing hi to each other. To which Buttercup questioned:

TELL HER LATER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

why is everybody saying hi to one another???!!!

She aptly responds to others questions but is clearly getting frustrated with the use of the microblog to say a simple greeting. She's looking for richer conversation. After about the sixth posting of hi, she responds:

WHY!!!!!!!???????

Looks like its time to intervene and see if we can come up with a purpose for twiducate/ microblogging. Looking forward to the discussion. Think we will start with "why?"

Vision of 21st Century Teachers

Excellent!

NCCE 2010

I am looking forward to attending NCCE this year in Seattle. I have gone for the last two years. In 2008, I was a cadre 1 Peer Coaching grant recipient. The conference was in Seattle and it was exciting to be at my first conference. Last year, I went to Portland and enjoyed meeting twitters and connecting with others. This year I will present..... and I am both nervous and excited. I am looking forward to visiting the booths and attending some great sessions.

Clustr Map

It's always nice to know who visits your site and where they come from. I like Clustr map because I like to incorporate geography into the site. Students have fun clicking on the map and seeing where the newest "red dot" is located.

clustr map

Start.io

I discovered start.io this last summmer. Start.io is a simple homepage that holds all of your bookmarks. You can organize the bookmarks into groups and use color to further organize the categories. I've been using start.io for my student computers' homepage. Everything is easily accessible and in one place. Now my students are asking about creating their own start.io pages at home, with parent permission. They are planning on putting all of their favorites sites on their pages to make them easily accessible at home. Love the home to school connection- love that they are taking the technology into their own hands.

My start.io page

start.io

Photopeach

One of my favorite slideshow tools is photopeach. I like the ease of use and the ability for students to make comments quickly. I often embed photopeach into my classroom blog. Here is a sample:

netbooks on PhotoPeach

NCCE

I've been working on this prezi for my presentation on 21st Century Primary Classrooms for NCCE . I think it is turning out ok. My goals are to create a presentation that shows what we do in my room- the integration of technology it daily literacy. It took a long time to convert my video files into flv but I think it is worth it in the end to have the student's voices in the presentation.

21st Century Learning in Primary Classroom on Prezi

Blogging

I am working on a presentation for a class in my building on blogging. I am using prezi which I love. IT really suites the way I think, non-linearly. I think it could be a great tool to use with students in working with story elements. What I like about prezi is that anyone can view it online- before, after, and during the presentation. And you can embed videos and links. My prezi's are still a work in progress- but isn't everything?

Blogging session 1 on Prezi

Delicious

I really love delicious. It allows me to collect EVERYTHING. I am pretty good at throwing out old clothes, messy papers, and bad food but information is my achilles heel. I love to collect information. You never know when you might NEED that information again. Delicious allows me to quickly save anything. Today, I wordled my delicous account and am surprised by some of my tags. Math and Science were large and those are the areas that I feel the least component in. I LOVE literacy and technology but math- well, I'd love to let someone else teach it. Maybe the wordle reflects what I am working on, learning about, and not what I feel strong in.

wordle:
Delicious

My New Blog

I've started this blog to use for my professional development with a focus on Technology in Primary classrooms. Things are changing so fast and I expect so much growth in the next few years. My classroom has been fortunate to be relatively technology rich, yet, I still question, how will this technology help my students learn? What will learning look like in the future?

My favorite author- Katie Wood Ray- said, in What You Know By Heart, "because we are teachers of writing, writing for us is more than just the experience of getting it done. We have to have that experience, but because we teach, we also have to be able to explain that experience. We have to be able to make sense of it, to see what it means so that the experience becomes something larger than the moment.... You see, the students who wait for us in our workshops need us to help them understand how this writing things happens. That's why we can't just let it happen. We have to know why it happens. We have to know how."

Substitute learning for writing. And particularly navigating "21st Century" learning. It's not enough for me to blog, tweet, FB, text message, use web 2.0 tools... I have to experience it so that I can explain the experience to the students. They may be "digital natives"- but I know about learning. And it's my job to help them experience the power of learning through these tools.