Saturday, May 12, 2012

Technology Thursday on Saturday

So it's not Thursday. I started this post yesterday but didn't get very far with it. I just couldn't get my thoughts together. I even deleted what I had written. Here's an update on how the ipods are going in my classroom. They are definitely my kids favorite center. They want to play them during free center time as well. I've been really lenient and letting them have free reign with the apps they are using. All the apps are educational of some kind. They are obsessed with the math games. I am still trying to figure out how to share with you guys the different apps that they are working on. (Ok, so now it's Saturday and I still haven't finished this post.)
Their favorite math game seems to be the rocket math. You can check it out here.  I have a very boy heavy class so they seem to love anything to do with space or superheroes. In this app you answer math questions to make your rocket go. I had a hard time navigating it when I was playing with it but my students seem to be having no problem with it. It amazes me how easy they find technology.
An app that we're just starting to explore a little is the Doodle Buddy App. I'm pretty sure this one is free. I saw a review on it on someone's blog. Don't remember whose it was though. Whoops. I used this one this week during my tutoring time. I tutor 2 afternoons a week 2 different sets of kids.  We are working a lot on making words, blending them, and writing sentences. After using the white boards, I decided to break out the ipod. I wrote a message to my student. He had to read it and then he had write me a message back.
This was the first message I wrote. I used sight words and then tried to use cvc words with sounds they needed to work on. Then he wrote a message back to me. It was good practice for this student. He needs a lot of help writing sentences. Then we tried to build some words with it.  The first afternoon this worked out great. The next afternoon I tried it out with my other student I tutor. It didn't work out so great. He struggled with writing on the screen. I see some potential ideas of ways to use this with my small groups and activities for the kids to use together.
One of my projects this summer is going to be to make some I can charts to go with this center and some kind of screen shot similar to what Erica Boher made for computer centers.
What apps do you students like? How do you use technology in your classroom?

2 comments:

  1. Thank you for sharing about your ipods in your class! We are supposed to be getting some tablets for our school soon so I am trying to learn all that I can.
    Lori
    Conversations in Literacy

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  2. I'm glad you got your thoughts together...great post. I am just starting to use an ipad in my classroom and my kids really do enjoy it. My kids like the abc magic apps. They have different ones for letters, sounds, spelling etc. and the best part is they are all free.
    Stacy

    simpsonsuperstars

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