Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Kilby Wax Museum

As part of an ongoing action research project, some of the 6th grade students transformed into wax figures to bring some social studies content into the Library Media Center. The students spent weeks researching their figures and creating 60 second biographical speeches. To complete this unit, the students will create a muti-media project to highlight the life of their figure. The students will be able to use a tool of their choice that they have learned about during their computer lab time. I am going to introduce them to another option called FlipSnack that could be added in their multi-media toolbox. This is a very short example of a FlipSnack. I used the free, most basic version of the tool.  What makes this so great is that any pdf or jpeg could be added into the book. I will encourage my students to make the pages of the book in PowerPoint and export the slides as jpeg files into the book. This way they can explain the images they use. The above embedded version only shows 3 pages for some reason. I am looking into a way around this without paying full price.Enjoy!

Thursday, March 21, 2013

iPad BootCamp

    Tuesday after school the Kilby faculty took part in iPad BOOTCAMP! In trying to integrate new technology in our school, our teachers received new iPads. Some of our teachers were already familiar with iPads and iPhones but we had several teachers who were completely new to this type of technology. Mrs. Frederick, our kindergarten teacher, served as my co-presenter in this presentation. While I presented the information, she went from teacher to teacher, helping them get used to their iPad. In this post I am going to show you the slides I used in the PowerPoint. We got through the first 1/2 of the presentation and will be finishing up in another session. Our teachers are very excited, as they should be. They were charged with practicing with their iPad and trying out new apps to be incorporated in their classrooms.Hopefully, by the end of this year, Kilby will house a new class set of iPads for student use. This should be a smooth transition for our students because our Kindergarten and 1st Grade classes already have student iPads. Check out the slides to see what our teachers learned in BOOTCAMP!