Listening to Stories

One of the activities that early readers can do at school and at home is listen to stories as they watch the words and the pictures. We have looked at this more closely in our grade 1 & 2 classrooms this past year and we are curious about whether increased listening time will help with reading fluency. One disclaimer I should make early on is that when my young adult children were small I had some songs on tape, but I wasn't a big fan of mechanized story voices--I wanted there to be a human connection when a child was being read to and I refused to purchase the popular toys of the time (like Teddy Ruxpin) that had taped stories embedded inside their fake fur. I still believe in that human connection for reading time, but I value the option of additional time on their own for children to hear great stories and vocabulary that might be beyond their reading level.

Some of the sites that are available online are:

1. TumbleBooks if you are a Portland Library Card Holder. Phrases are highlighted.
2. Storyline Online has stories read aloud by actors.
3. Oxford Owl has many ebooks that can be read aloud.

Some of these are now configured to work around Flash issues on an iPad. If you setup a home button from Safari to go to TumbleBooks it automatically goes to the Mobile Devices page that has books that don't need Flash.

For more sites the students at YES go to our Educational Resources site for instance on the Reading and Writing page for second grade.

Volcanoes in Google Earth

We can add layers to Google Earth on our MacBooks by using this information from the Smithsonian Institute.

Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program data for known or inferred Holocene volcanoes are now available as a Google Earth layer, displaying a photo (when available), geographic data, and links to more detailed information from the GVP and international volcano observatories or other websites focusing on regional volcanoes. The Google Earth software must be downloaded and installed to use this placemark file.

Download Holocene Volcanoes Network Link

Download Smithsonian / USGS Weekly Volcanic Activity Report Network Link

(From http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/globallists.cfm?listpage=googleearth).

Nexus 7 Rollout in 4th Grade

YEAH!!!! The Nexus 7s arrived in Maine on Friday afternoon and we were able to give them to students just three days later. Kate Parkin (4th grade teacher) and I had spent time preparing for the devices, exploring apps, becoming familiar with various resources like Edutecher and Android4Schools and thinking about how to bring this to her students in the most productive way. Some weekend work went into charging, updating and preparing the tablets with each student's Yarmouth Google account. We were pleased to find that there is a Content Filtering Setting that should modify any suggested apps and materials to keep them appropriate for students.

As teachers, Kate and I planned for the physical realities of having the new set of devices in her classroom. Consistent with our practice with student 1:1 laptops we ordered cases to protect the tablets. At the time we ordered they were $6.95 each and they have the added feature of putting the device to sleep or waking it on opening. We set up 4 bins in the classroom with plug strips nearby. The strips only allow 3 plugs at a time so we will be rotating overnight charging.

Once we did the planning and getting the room ready it was time to rollout the tablets. We invited parents, our building principal, Alice Barr (integrator at Yarmouth High School) and a college student who has helped us move ahead with technology since we was a student at YES. We planned an hour and a half at the end of the school day for the rollout. We started by giving each student a label to decorate so that s/he could easily identify her/his own tablet in the bins. We affixed the labels to the cases with plastic book spine labels to help them last through the year.

The slideshow above shows a set of photos from the preparation, through the labeling, to unboxing the Nexus 7s, changing the wallpaper and widgets on the devices. Once the students had done some personalizing and exploring the screens available Kate used the document camera to project her Nexus 7 onto the screen and showed students how to download and install a set of apps that we had previewed. We looked for an assortment of apps that allowed students to create simple projects, take notes and practice math facts as a start. In the slideshow you can see the students working from this list of apps.

Apps to download:

Skitch

Evernote

Free Rice

50 States

Google Drive

PopMath Lite

NASA

Space Images

Math Workout

Sudoku Plus

Math Maniac

Countries of the World

Note Everything

SimpleMind Free

Kitchen Timer

Camera Launcher

ListNote Speech to Text

This video gives a quick glimpse of the classroom once the students are exploring apps:

Many thanks to all who helped with this successful rollout and especially to Mark Wagner and the EdTechTeam for donating the devices to our school. An additional post about the arrival of the Nexus 7's is posted on Kate Parkin's classroom blog.

Fall Apps for First Grade Learning

Apps that we have purchased for the first grade classrooms this fall:

• ABC Spelling Magic (Short Vowel Sounds) - free
• ABC Spelling Magic 2 (Consonant Blends) - free
• ABC Spelling Magic 3 (Blends & Syllables) - free
• All My High Frequency Words
• Cimo Spelling (Lite)
• DoodleBuddy
• DraftPad
• Futaba- Word games for kids
• iKids Puzzle
• Google Earth
• Know your Math Facts
• iBooks
• LetterSchool
• Little Patterns
• Mathwise - free
• Math Bingo
• Montessori Approach to Addition Charts
• Montessori Approach 100 to 200
• Montessori Approach to 100 Board
• Montessori Crosswords
• Motion Math - Hungry Fish
• Pocket Charts! Beginning Letter Sounds 
• Pocket Charts! Long and Short Sounds
• PopMath Maths Plus
• PuppetPals
• Scribble Press - free
• Sight Words by Photo Touch - free
• Storykit - free 
• Sushi Monster - free
• Tell Time Little Matchups - free
• Telling Time Photo Touch  

We added some apps specifically for teachers. The apps that were free are on all 20 iPads, the few paid apps are only on one iPad per classroom:

• Dragon Dictation - free
• Educreations - free
• Explain Everything
• Pages
• Puffin Browser - free
• Quickvoice Recorder - free
• Show Me Interactive Whiteboard - free
• Skype - free
• The Weather Channel - free 

Most of the apps were available for volume purchase so we bought 20 copies of those for the price of 10. So far we have introduced LetterSchool, Little Patterns, iKids Puzzle and MathWise in classrooms. It is working well to assign five students to each iPad and store any saved games for them when they return. The next challenge is to figure out flexible grouping based on student needs and then appropriately managing the settings for each group.