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!