Start Simple!

Learning to use the camera app is a great place to start when learning about the power an iPad can play in learning process.

This past month I have begun working with three classrooms who have never really used an iPad before. In my new school we have only had 5 iPads and have not used them a great deal to create knowledge. Last month we borrowed 10 iPads from our Outreach program provided by the CBE ILC (Innovative Learning Commons). 

I thought, what better way to begin using these devices than to use the camera app to take some photos around the school. Here's a snippet of what the three different classrooms did.

Graphemes Around the School

This grade 1 class used the iPad to take photos of letters (graphemes) that they could find around our building. Of course this was an easy task but a great one for students to get excited about finding the different letters they were learning about. 

We created our own success criteria from holding the device to taking the photo, and also to deleting images that weren't worthy of being downloaded.

After we gathered all the photos (which I downloaded from each iPad and then shared to our community folder) we talked about which images were good photos and which weren't so good and why that was.


 

Once all images were accessible from our server, the students then wrote their names (in Comic Life) using the different letters everyone in the class had found. 

Numbers Around Us

This grade one class put a spin on what they would take photos of. They went out around the school building to find different numbers they recognized. This proved more challenging as they found many numbers they could not recognize.

I downloaded the photos, as I did for the letters group. Once we had sorted them them somewhat, students were to choose numbers that were meaningful to them and then create an info graphic based on there chosen numbers. 

  

Colour, Colour Everywhere!

The kindergarten students took photos of different colours around our school. 

Once all photos are gathered in the same manner as above (we have not finished this project yet), we will use comic life again to share our work. We plan on adding photos and the names of each colour to a document then comparing to each other and building on to it further from there.

More to come on this project!

Gr1-2 Science - Eco Columns

Student Learning Goal:

To learn about the differences of living and nonliving things and how they affect each other.

App:

Skitch for iPad

Learning Task:

Through this inquiry, students explored living and non living things they could find around our school. They took photos of them using the iPads to show what they discovered.

Through the scientific process, the students explored how living and nonliving things affect each other by designing and making an eco-column. Each eco column had three layers in which each contribute to each other to make an mini ecosystem. 

Students observed their eco-columns daily and monitored their progress and time progressed.

The iPads were also used to monitor and document the progress. 

Skitch App by Evernote

The used an App called Skitch to annotate pictures they took using the iPad which was very easy to learn to use and gave an effective finishing product.