iAchieve Students at the Science Fair!

Our kids had a great time during 4th quarter learning about creature systems and cycles. Their discoveries culminated at the school Science Fair, where they were able to share presentations and videos created on their iPads.  It was so exciting to see their creativity!

Videos to Support Instruction

Looking for a good video to enrich content delivery, or provide that extra support for visual learners?  Check out this list of the best of educational video websites!

http://edudemic.com/2012/08/best-video-sites-for-teachers/

Student email lesson

What Is Email?

What Is Email?

Using iPads in the classroom has provided many additional 21st Century learning opportunities for our students.  One of them has been to think of email in a different way.  Most youngsters view email like texting, just another way to communicate with friends.

But the iPads have caused a shift in understanding that email can be a everyday workhorse, allowing students to deliver class work to their teacher quickly.  Recently, we visited Mr. Myers' third grade class to teach them how to set up their student email account on their iPads.  Mrs. Sallee taught them about netiquette and good email practices.  Taking into account the reading and writing objectives for the week, tudents were excited to send a test email to their teacher as their hands-on final assignment!

Excited Readers!

With another school year comes another group of students using the iPods, and new converts to using the fluency recording process to improve reading skills.  Each class that learns how to make recordings using their iPods shows the same enthusiasm we've seen from the beginning!  When Mrs. Sallee (i.e., "The iPod Lady") visits, students are excited to show her all the new things they've learned since she first showed them how to do recordings and use apps to support their learning.

There are also those teachable moments with the classroom teacher, with time for discussion about new ideas and lesson planning for how the iPods might best support a specific instructional objective that will be covered during upcoming weeks.

Every day is a new exploration of how these mobile devices can be used!

Learning Geometric Shapes & A Visit - January 2011

As part of the December/January instructional calendar, our 3rd grade classes have been studying various geometric shapes and their properties.  During this time, the iAchieve Team was visited by Ms. Jennifer Lane, one of Maricopa County's Technology Integration Trainers.  She was able to observe students actively engaged in learning specific math skills supported by iPod technology!





In several classes, students collaborated together to search the internet on their iPods for real-life items having a geometric shape.  We saw ice cream and construction cones, old 1950-era TV's shaped like a cube and many types of pyramid buildings and sphere sculptures.  It was technology-supported learning with a real life context.  Awesome!

Back to work...

The holidays are now over and we are back to work!  Our district is currently preparing to tear down one of our older schools and rebuild a beautiful new one in its place.  This has impacted our Papago School iAchieve teachers and students, who have been moved across the street to portable buildings on a temporary site for the next year.  As these classes packed up for the move, the iPods became priceless classroom resources when other instructional resources were inaccessible because they were boxed up!  Quality learning continued without pause until the last moment, thanks to these 1:1 devices.

We appreciate Ms. Nyabela, Ms. Cloyd and Ms. Seabert and all their students!

Finally... a blog!

I've been so busy configuring iPods and training teachers that I haven't taken the time to begin my "Trainer's Blog".  That ends today!

What began as a group of 20 intrepid teachers who were willing to take a leap of faith and integrate iPod touches into their classroom instruction, has now grown to 24.  Several of our principals supported the idea so much, they used site funding to purchase equipment for additional teachers.  We agreed to support them with training and mentoring, so off we go!