Kristin's+Journaling+Page

10/6 Now that I'm able to see the final approved aps, I feel like we can really sink our teeth into planning specific lessons and activities! The collaborative group that I'm working with in my district has started to form some specific routines that revolve around the use of the iPad. In addition, the group that I'm observing has already successfully used the iPad in literacy lessons. I'm excited about having a specific time in which to use the iPads with my colleagues and students. I feel that will keep us on our toes, to ensure that we teach new uses for this tool on a regular basis.

11/2 "Smiles all around!" This observation was made by an instructional aide to our self-contained class, when I surprised them with our "Speak It" app this morning. Our students wrote a sentence using the word "frost" (did anyone else have to scrape their car this morning?). The teacher encouraged her students to use more descriptive words and phrases, just like she does in the classroom. The students really did come up with some rich, complex sentences. Then, of course, they had to go through the process of typing the sentence into the iPad. It was great to see how easily they could figure out how to handle the keyboard. The back button, capitalization, and the space button were easy to figure out. Of course, typing took time and patience for them, but at the end it was all worth it. When I pressed the "Speak It!" button, and the sentence was read to them, they were amazed! They loved having there work read back to them... and were inspired to write another sentence. I see these tools as such a benefit for that class.

In addition, these tools have been a great benefit to our inclusion class. Using ComicLite, students in Mrs. Harvey's class were able to classify animals, find a picture (from a safe database, not Google!) of an animal in that classification, and type out a caption for that animal to explain why they fit the particular classification, all in one forty-minute lesson. In fact, they even had enough time to examine their classmates' work to review all of the various classifications, in addition to the one they had worked with. Students could focus on the content of the words they chose, instead of cutting, glueing, lettering, and other steps that would have made this a much more complex and time-consuming task. And, their understanding could truly be assessed on the explanations they included in the captions instead of neatness, quality of the pictures, and other incidentals.

Even with these successes, and easily observable learning benefits, I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of this tool. I'm looking forward to hearing about my colleagues visit to Pioneer, and heading there myself later this week to hear how others are using this amazing educational tool.