Reflections in Tech

Mrs. Stamey and Mrs. Robertson at Icard Elementary have been excellent to work with this year! They have been eager and willing when I bring them an idea for an activity. We've muscled through some iffy situations with geocaching... (mowers, weather, and satellites), but we've had great success with both of our "Mystery Skype" sessions.  We met up in the media center, each student had a job, armed with index cards, and iPad, or a map and marker. This was a simplified version of how we participated in the middle school setting. The 3rd graders needed only to find the state of the partner class. Our first attempt went really well in that we asked a difficult question that had to be answered with both a yes and a no, which led us pretty quickly to where they were. Our second session was definitely a learning experience for the young geographers. We were the 7th call of the day for our partner class, and boy did they have their questioning down pat. We took...

7th graders at EBMS participated in a QR review activity using iPads for Science and Social Studies. 25 questions were spread throughout the theatre and worked in small groups and got a workout while reviewing the material.

A second grade teacher at Icard Elementary approached me about a project idea for reviewing Life Cycles. She wanted to recreate a project she'd done previously, so I started brainstorming how best to get the project completed.  I needed a way to get images for the various stages of the life cycles for several animals/insects. I wanted to have the images prepared ahead of time so that the collage creation was seamless. I found the images on Pixabay and Discovery Education and created individual Photo Streams in iPhoto on my MacBook. This could be done with an iPad or iPhone using the Photos app. Just click on "Shared" to open your streams, and click the "+" to add a new stream. You give the photo stream a name, and then add the accounts to share. I created a photo stream for the following critters; praying mantis, sockeye salmon, ladybugs, stink bugs, Appalachian Snaketail, frog, and butterfly. I shared the streams with two Apple ID's, the ID assoc...

Kindergartners at Icard Elementary School took part in a Mystery Number Skype call with a classroom from Mull Elementary School. Each class took turns asking "yes or no" questions to uncover the mystery number. The students asked questions like, "Does your number have a straight line?', "Is your number even?", or "Does your number have a 2?" Each class shared three mystery numbers. They were really excited to participate and asked some great questions. The students were eager to offer suggestions for future Mystery Skype calls; mystery shape, mystery letter, mystery color. I think they're onto something with the mystery shape idea...