Year 1 students had a go with Sphero, a spherical robot toy controlled by a mobile device or tablet. The students had a chance to freely explore and play supporting their pushes and pulls unit. Later, the students raced Sphero through a path and obstacle course. It was a bit tricky getting Sphero over a ramp to finish the race!
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Year1 students learned to access the primary school webmix, a collection of websites we use in primary school on symbaloo. To do this they log on to the computer and open the Google Chrome web browser. Our webmix is the default home page in the Google Chrome web browser. The students then selected the Teach Your Monster To Read website to play the game 'Fun With Words' and practise their reading skills. Teach Your Monster To Read will remember each student as they practise reading at their own pace, giving them feedback and reporting on progress to the teacher. If students have access to a computer with internet at home, I would encourage them to log on to the game and continue playing under the supervision of their parents here. The students know their user names and passwords for the game.
When i initially read about 30 Hands, i installed it on my iPad and deleted it as the GUI (graphic user interface) was not very appealing. I decided to use other apps. When i worked with Year 1 students creating a digital story, i struggled to get the free apps i had to publish the story. Out of desperation, tried 30 Hands and it did the trick. I was so impressed that the app was easy enough for Year 1 students to push the record button when they were ready to speak and when they were done. We easily moved from one picture to the other. The most amazing thing was discovering that we could go back to recordings to delete them and record all over again or delete a picture/slide and insert another one. Other apps i tried did not allow us to go back and edit. 30 Hands is a great free iPad app i would recommend for use in classrooms for digital storytelling. We saved our product on the iPad and uploaded to YouTube later. Watch our video below. We read the interactive iPad story 'The Purple Frog". Students are now used to reading interactive stories that they stay focused on the story. We talked about the story afterwards and students knew they needed to be open minded and accept everyone for who they are. I used the story to discussed how friends should behave in the classroom, while we are learning. My questions were 'How should friends behave when someone is talking in class? Should they be talking, laughing with each other?' Students thought about it and said friends should only talk when it is time to talk. If they needed to say something while we were learning they would raise their hands for a turn to speak. I like how we used this story to talk about classroom situations. After learning about life cycles, Year 1 students read a book about the life cycle of a frog. We had fun creating content for other learners, explaining the life cycle of a frog. We used the Educreations iPad app to record ourselves solving a puzzle (putting a few pictures of the life cycle in their correct order) and explaining the different stages in our own words. We learned the importance to speak louder so that the iPad could pick up our voices. See our class recording below. We look forward to using Educreations again to explain concepts for other learners.
Year 1 students were excited about telling others about the water cycle. Words describing the stages of the water cycle were a bit difficult to remember so they recorded their voices using the Sock Puppets iPad app to make a puppet video saying what they learned in their own words. We look forward to creating content for other learners using puppet videos as we learn to speak clearly and fluently. |
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AuthorKahlil Danai Maramba, Categories
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April 2016
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