Videolicious and Plant Discovery

We took our iPads OUTDOORS!! Yay! We have this great forest outside our school so we decided to explore it with our iPads. Students took photos of plants, leaves, stems, and roots. They were so excited and it was so nice to be outside.

Students worked together in groups using the Videolicious app. Students recorded their voices and added music to create fun and interesting videos about plants.

Students took it upon themselves to write down the dialogue before recording. It was really interesting to see all the different skills students required to create videos collaboratively. It was amazing to watch how students decided to both speak and record videos at the same time. It was amazing to see the problem solving.

My only real issue is the background noise. It is really hard to record audio in a classroom because you end up with a lot of voices :(

Free play

Students have free play time everyday. I think this time is critical for early primary students. Today, one student took it upon herself to make some houses out of wood. Then she took pictures of them and labelled them. Here is her work:

I can't tell you how excited I was to see a student using the iPads and creating her own activity. It was neat to see her making a connection between some of the things we have been doing and her own ideas.

Plants, Skitch, and Book Creator

We have been studying plants for the past few weeks. Today I decided that the students would demonstrate their leaning by using Skitch and Book Creator. Students worked in groups of four and were asked to do one of four things. They were assigned; the needs of a plant, the parts of a plant, or the life cycle of a bean. Students used Skitch to either draw or take photos. Students labelled the parts of their drawings and then saved them. Once saved, students opened Book Creator and began to create a book with their drawings and labels. Students also took turns recording their voices and sharing their information.

Skitch is great because it is compatible with Evernote so the work can be saved a student's notebook (eportfolio). This is helpful when iPads are shared with other classes. You don't need to worry if another student deletes or changes the work. I like Book Creator because not only can you open the book in epub form you can also email the book as a pdf.

Here are some screenshot examples of picture drawn or photos taken and labelled using Skitch.

My students used these in Book Creator to write and record their own book. Below are some screenshots of the pages of one book. You can see the audio symbol where the students recorded their voices. Unfortunately, you can't hear the recordings because these are just screenshots.

Now I need to learn how to insert a pdf into this blog??? Ideass? Suggestions?? Still new to this blogging thing :)