Kindergarten Pond Getting Techie!!

I have spent the last two days at our county's Digital Renaissance Summer Conference!!  (If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen a lot of tweets with #digrensc.) I am on fire and ready for school to start so I can share all this fabulous tech with my kiddos!!!

( 2nd, 1st, and Kindergarten representing with our Superintendent!)

Here is just a taste of what I learned from the past two days:

Kevin Honeycutt 

Have you met this guy? If not, you are missing out. He is an amazing teacher with so much to share!!! Check out his web page and YouTube channel.

My  five major takeaways from him were:
1. Relationships are important between student and teacher! Teacher empowerment comes from being trusted, how you feel when you are learning is how you remember the learning – emotion cements learning and leads to launch moments!!!!

2. We need to teach ourselves and our students to "Learn to Love to Learn". We should all be "self-updating software" continuously improving and learning on our own.
3. Be prescriptive! Make the tool fit the students.

4. Don't be secret geniuses!!!! Share! Social media is like a jar of lightening bugs, the more you have the more you can see!!!
5.  Find the teachers you want to be like then stalk follow them! Learn from each other!

Kindergarten Tech (using 1 to 1 iPads)

Here are some fabulous apps I discovered:
Brainstorm & Brainstorm Companion (to use whole group, students respond to a question or prompt and then "flick" their answer to the teacher's iPad which can be displayed on the board)
Stage (allows you to use iPad as a document camera, it also have tools on the side to annotate and more)
Eggy Words (sight words game)

Using Popplet in K

Beginning sounds sort - (reading center) Letter cards on desk with a lot of different picture cards to sort (ex. Letter b card on table, find the pictures that begin with /b/, take photographs of cards and add to Popplet)

Students take a picture of self and then add adjectives around the picture

Students take a picture of self and add pictures of all the other students and type in their names

Essential question – so that everyone can share their answer: students come up and answer on the  board or on the iPad in a center

Facts about a topic - written or pictures

Pre-writing - answer questions to prepare to write a narrative

Using QR Codes in K
Record reading, writing, and singing to send home.
Teacher record leveled readers, add QR code to the book, students can follow along in the book as they listen to the story.
Multiple uses during reading centers - memory, sight word review, sound matching, word writing - using the QR codes to check work.
*Great sites:
www.recordmp3.org, www.qrcode-monkey.com, www.qrstuff.com

iMovie 
Let me begin by saying, Eric Lee from Technology in Motion (Jacksonville State) is amazing! He is so knowledgeable and patient. This is the second time I have attended a session of his and learned so much each time! (I attended his iMovie session last year and then updated my OS system and iMovie changed.) I plan to make a how to video and share with you very soon for my students and to post here!

Google Drive
I have used Google Drive in the past as a file sharing tool but oh my goodness, Drive is so much more!!! I may not use it to it's full potential with my students but it will definitely come in handy with our new collaborative planning!!!

And last but not least, I WON AN IPAD MINI FOR MY CLASS!!! I am so excited and so thankful!!! Thank you to all of the people that presented and organized this amazing conference!!!

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Five for Friday - Spring is Here!!!

It is Friday and I am linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching again to bring you five fabulous things that happened this week in my class.

Pardon the horrible cell phone picture in the dark skating rink!

We are coming to the end of the school year and have officially begun "this is our last ____". Yesterday we went on our last skating trip of the year. This is a fundraiser we do each quarter. Each grade level goes skating at a different time during the day. The trip lasts about two hours because we walk to the rink which is less than a mile away and the kids skate for almost an hour. I love watching the progress of my Kinders from 1^st quarter until now. It is amazing how many can skate by the end of the year.

My class participated in our feeder pattern’s digital showcase on Tuesday. Visiters from the county and state as well as representatives from education companies came in to see how we have implemented using iPads (K-2^nd) and Macbooks (3^rd) over the last few weeks.

My Kinders have been so excited to have the iPads. We have been using Rosetta Stone to learn a new language, we have used Popplet to create webs, we have used Discovery Education for so many things(lots of blog posts about this and many more to come), we have used Scrawlar.com for writing words and letters and more that I am sure I am forgetting. All this in 3 weeks with only 12 iPads! I cannot even imagine how great it will be when we get a class set next year and have them from the beginning - I cannot wait!!

Wednesday we began our unit on plants and flowers for spring. Thanks to Mrs. Lee’s Kindergarten’s idea, we read Peter Rabbit and then received a letter from Mr. McGregor (Freebie here). In his letter, Mr. McGregor told us that mischievous Peter had finally eaten all of his vegetables and he was in need of a new garden. Problem was, he couldn’t remember how he started his garden the first time. He ask if we would come up with a plan to grow a garden and keep out that naughty Peter Rabbit!

So far we have made a Popplet of things he will need to make a garden and to keep Peter out. Let me tell you, these Kiddos are ruthless! I sure would hate to be Peter Rabbit trying to get into their gardens. We have learned what foods we get from the garden, and have begun making our pretend paper garden in the hall. We will continue to add to our hall garden and then write a letter back to Mr. McGregor with our findings.

iPad Update!

From our lesson on growing a garden, questions came about why Mr. McGregor needs a garden, why we don’t all grow a garden, and such so I decided to take a step back yesterday.  I created two boards in Discovery Education to use to teach a lesson on where food comes from and different types of farms and gardens. My kids loved it. Each pair signed into DE and found the board I assigned them. Here is the first board we looked at (sorry for the multiple pictures, I could only get so much in the screen shot):

 I sort of put the pictures together to give you the full effect of what the kids saw. :)

We had a great discussion about where our food comes from. We had talked about the farm earlier in the year so most of them said a farm but then I asked if they get their food from a farm and thought I was hilarious. This led to a great discussion of where grocery stores get their food. We then made a list of what foods we get from plants and what food we get from animals.

After lunch we came back for our second board (picture below), this one full of videos on farms and farmers. By this point I had some kids check out and some of my kids had gone to small group and speech so by borrowing a few iPads from my sweet neighbor, all my kids had were able to have their own. They loved being able to watch the movies by themselves and then stop and discuss with their table and the rest of class what they learned. It was so weird how much better attention they paid to the videos on the iPads than they ever have when I play them on the board!

Again I have attempted to put the two pictures together. On both boards I have the note cards with questions about the pictures (in board 1) and the video (in board 2). I read the questions but I wanted to put them on the boards so my kids could also read them if they went back later. 

I got new plants last weekend and my house is finally looking like it is spring. I am so happy to see/feel sunshine!!!! 

Of course I forgot to take pictures and will have to come back and add them later!

So that was five things that happened this week in our Kindergarten Pond. What about you? I can't wait to see what happened with your kiddos so head over to Doodle Bugs Teaching and link up!

Happy Friday!!!