Collaboration Project

This semester I learned so much about how I can integrate technology into a classroom. As I start my first teaching job in August in a third grade classroom, I am very eager to take many of the activities/ideas and the knowledge I learned and use them in my own classroom! I was very fortunate to be able to work with many great teachers this semester that have prepared me and shared many great things I can do in my classroom. I am very thankful for the teachers who invited me into their classrooms for me to observe and help out with the technology aspect of their lesson. From these opportunities, I gained confidence as a new educator. Below you will find some of the projects that I got to be apart of throughout the semester! 

I was very fortunate to help two different resource teachers use Shadow Puppet with their students. Shadow Puppet is a great app to use with all students. Shadow Puppet brings out the creativeness of students as they make videos, slideshows and presentations. Students are able to use their own pictures from a camera roll/album or they can search for pictures or clip art within the app. A cool feature that students can do with their videos, slideshows, and presentations is that they can add music, narrate their project, add text to their slides. To me the most exciting feature of Shadow Puppet is how easy it is to share the student's project with friends, family members, and staff by the having many options of sending it. This includes a link, email, Facebook, Twitter, and so much more! 

The first hour I worked with Susan and her students (2nd graders!) who were working on their animal research projects. Before using Shadow Puppet the students had their project written out on paper and then pictures to go along with each slide. The students could choose to add their picture they drew or find pictures on the app. Once we had the pictures ready to go the students narrated their project for each slide. Each student had a cover slide, habitat slide, description of animal, what the animal eats, interesting facts, and then a closing slide. Students read from their paper for each slide. The projects turned out amazing. The best part of using Shadow Puppet is how excited the students were to use it and how proud they were of their project!! 

The next hour I worked with Paula, a student teacher, and the students (4th Grade!) who were working on their persuasion essays. Each student had a different topic. The student who I worked with had the topic of "Why Don't Teachers Let Us Use More Technology in the Classroom." These students had the same concept of having a layout already made of their topic and reasons. Student had to find pictures within the app to connect to their topic. Students would be using less pictures for their presentation but doing more talking to persuade the audience. The students did a fantastic job finding pictures to connect to their topic to make their audience engaged!

Another project that I helped with was in Annie Leaf's classroom where the students are preparing for the NESA test. Students were assigned partners and each group had an assigned chapter to take questions from. Before coming up to the table students had four questions that that they wrote out. These questions ranged from true/false, multiple choice, and finally questions to solve and show work. Before entering these questions into Socrative, Mrs. Leaf checked over their work and talked through the problem to make sure it was the correct answer. On Tuesday, when I was there students were taking turns using the laptops to enter their questions on Socrative. There was a time limit to make sure all students were able to come up to the table to enter their questions. The students really enjoyed this because they were the ones make the quiz for one another. This was a great activity to be apart of because it was the students hard work of finding the questions for each chapter and then entering it into Socrative. Students will now be practicing taking the quiz until the NESA as a good review resource for them.

Another activity that I helped out with in Mrs. Leaf's room was helping students make screen casts using Educreations. Once they were done entering their questions into Socrative, I worked with each group on picking a problem that could make a screen cast of. Before students would start the screen cast, I had them practice on a whiteboard talking through the problem. During this time we also decided how we would divide the problem up between the two or three students. Having them practice work got their jitters out and they were very successful at making a screen cast. Once all groups were done making a screen cast, the link to the video was linked on their class website so they can watch these videos during work stations and even at home for another review resource. Below is the link the the Educreation the students made with me.

https://www.educreations.com/lesson/view/mrs-leaf-s-math/30607269/?s=OPyZ7y