Crazy about i-Pads and Smartboards!

I am so blessed to have many forms of technology available to help educate my students in my new district and it is time to start blogging about it!  In my kindergarten classroom, I have 4 i-Pads hooked up to AirPlay and a Smartboard.

One lesson was completed during guided reading/writing, we were working on the words I and like and writing a complete sentence using those two words.  I had the students write a sentence about themselves in their writing journal (I like...).  Then using the app Popplet lite the students took a picture of themselves to place in the middle of a character web.  They typed their first "I like" sentence in a new bubble and then typed another sentence in the next bubble.  The app allows you to take a picture of the popplet and from there I posted it to my students individual Kidblogs.

 

I have a classroom blog setup through Blogger and my hopes for the blog is to inform parents about what goes on inside our classroom and to realize all the learning and hard work a 5/6 year old does in Kindergarten!  I find it difficult to get my students and parents to realize that reading is thinking!  To help, I have started having a couple of students draw out their thinking during shared reading.  I have used the app ScreenChomp.  ScreenChomp is a free whiteboard/recording app that allows the students to use it like a drawing app and then record what they are drawing.

Here is one example!  We were reading It's Pumpkin Time by Zoe Hall. I had two students record their thinking (I liked... It reminded my of...  How would I feel...).  First, they drew their thinking in ScreenChomp and then recorded what the story reminded them of.  Here is a picture of what it looked like.

The story reminded the student about our field trip to the pumpkin patch and all the work that goes into planting a pumpkin patch.