Fun Friday: Playing with our new Ipads

As part of the Texas Literacy Initiative, my school received two carts of brand new Ipads. The carts had been in my room for a few days, but my students did not notice. They were a bit surprised when I said we were going to be getting them out. Then they were a bit disappointed when I said we were going to be playing word games. 

Despite their initial thinking, the word games were a hit. I gave them a list of apps to choose from, and each class seemed to have its own favorite. I expected groans, and lots of this is boring. Instead, I saw students working together to figure things out. They asked questions when they were stuck. They told me they learned things. I was really impressed, and I am excited to do this again. 

The choices (we used the free versions of all apps):

• RhymieStymie - determine a set of synonyms that rhyme together
• This is to That - solve analogies
• Get+Together - figure out compound words based on clues and pictures (this one was really good for my ELLS)
• Grading Game - find all of the errors in a paper or be fired
• Idiom Stories - What does the idiom mean? (another good one for my ELLs)
• Word Stack - put together words by association

Playing with Nearpod

I am a lifelong learner. I will never know everything I would like to know, but every opportunity I have to learn something, I jump at it. 

Last night, I had the opportunity to work with our district Texas Literacy Initiative technology representatives. They came to campus and conducted a workshop on educational apps to use in the classroom. My favorite of the night was Nearpod, especially since I make PowerPoint presentations for everything. 

With Nearpod, I can upload my presentations, then edit them to include polls, short answer responses, draw responses, quizzes, and videos. My presentations now go from discussion to complete interaction. Not only can you have the students respond, you can show their responses anonymously to discuss (or laugh at, as we did with the drawings today). The program will also save a report of all the responses to whatever you have within the presentation. 

Today was a district testing day for us, so I only had two afternoon classes. I decided to throw together a quick test run. I did tell the kids we were playing today, so you'll see some of the non-seriousness. 

This was a hit from the very beginning. There was so much smiling going on in my classroom, and that doesn't usually happen after three hours of testing. They were 100% engaged. The only complaint I heard was, "I don't wanna put this on my phone. It takes up memory!" Teenagers. 


I have pasted each slide with some of the student responses:

SLIDE 1

SLIDE 2

SLIDE 2 RESPONSES

SLIDE 3

SLIDE 3 RESPONSES

SLIDE 4

SLIDE 4 RESPONSES

SLIDE 5

SLIDE 5 - RESPONSE 1

SLIDE 5 - RESPONSE 2

SLIDE 5 - RESPONSE 3

SLIDE 5 - RESPONSE 4
(NOT SURE WHAT TO THINK ABOUT THIS SINCE I AM BLOND)