Wow! What a whorl wind these last three weeks have been! I have learned so much in such a little bit of time it is incredible. Obviously enough to land me sick in bed with a head cold last week and another sinus headache today! The last conference we attended was the state technology cadre. Perhaps what surprised me the most was that Jeremy hardly said a word...the presenters actually had to engage him in conversations.
As much as he intimidates, me I have to say I love listening to him talk! I learn so much from the pilferia of information that spews forth from his mouth! While attending this conference I learned about several apps that might be of use in our classrooms: Storybird (web based tool), Splice, Dropbox, Evernote, and Show Me. Jeremy's ideas for how to use Show Me are incredible--he uses it for monitoring progress by having students do a quick assessment during class, using it as an exit ticket--such as tell me a question you still have or show/play an answer to a specific question he gives, etc.... Show me is an app that allows users to record audio while drawing or adding pictures to a whiteboard. I love the idea as a quick formative assessment tool to see if students were able to meet the goals for the lesson or even provide an avenue to privately convey messages to the teacher. What he does is set up a separate google account and use that to set up Show Me. Then students email all show me creations to that account for the teacher to retrieve or just show the teacher as a quick check! Love it! I have to admit I was jealous when Gail pulled up a chair right beside him and was soaking it in...but I guess I got to do that at the coaches training and perhaps I will do that again this coming week. See what else I can gleam from him. :)
Storybird is a storybook creation tool with real illustrations that students can use. The illustrations are great! Originally I thought that this was only good for elementary teachers, but after reading "Dieing to be thin" I have to say this is a great tool for all ages. I was very impressed with the capabilities of this as well. Not only can students create books either through inspiration of the pictures or theme as well as basic storyline. You can collaborate with another person--they write one page, then you, then them, then you, etc.... I was surprised when the presenter said you could use it to isolate specific skills--we were assigned to pick a picture and then write an alliteration that went with it. She also mentioned focusing on sentence structure, fluency, writing introductions, etc.... I think I need to ask Gail more about what she is looking for when looking at sentence fluency....
Ok, I need to finish my dishes and get to bed.... I will head back to Weston tomorrow and image the rest of the ipads (which will go smoothly) and then see about imaging Kolleen's set again. I tried to do this for Ann last Tuesday...not sure it is going to go as fluid as we hope...I think we should have checked the "automatically sync apps" in each ipad. Will talk to Joe tomorrow about this and hopefully find out why number line didn't go onto Ann's when I tried to resync them Tuesday.
I am off...more tomorrow...ok friday...we have football tomorrow. Go ROCKETS!
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