If You Give a Teacher an iPad...

Fluttering Through The Butterfly Unit With Digital Notebooks

The spring semester life cycle units create a lot of excitement for elementary campuses in Northwest ISD.  Kindergarten anxiously awaits the arrival of ladybugs, first grade live streams chicks hatching and growing, and second grade celebrates the life cycle and release of butterflies.   Instructional technologist Kelli Sanders and Britt Horn saw these exciting units as a great time to partner with Kelly Suarez, Elementary Science Coordinator. Together these three instructional leaders worked collaboratively to design interactive digital notebooks for kindergarten, first, and second grade life cycle units.  These interactive digital notebooks created many opportunities for our youngest learners to use their digital skills to think critically and communicate the information they have learned throughout the unit.

Kristen Daugherty, 2nd grade educator from Hatfield Elementary is one of many educators from our district who was excited to provide her students with the opportunity to showcase their learning through the digital journal.  Throughout this journal students were recording their observational changes over time, predicting and recording data trends on a picture graph, and using the language of the discipline to explain and justify important vocabulary.  At the completion of this project, students shared what they have learned to a district-wide Flipgrid board as well as had the opportunity to listen to other students sharing about what they have learned during the unit. 

Mrs. Daugherty loved that her students were challenged to dig deep into rigorous thinking while staying engaged in the interactive elements of the digital journal. Mrs. Daugherty also loved the ease of having a district vetted pre-created resource she could easily integrate into her classroom with confidence.

When PBL meets App Smashing Field Day Fun

When the second grade at Hatfield Elementary was asked by their PE teacher to plan and design a new field day game that incorporates force, motion and/or balance, students jumped at the chance to create a great solution to this Problem Based Learning (PBL) challenge. 

To build schema students worked in groups with hands-on activities to learn about balance, rolling, spinning, and sliding. They researched various field day games using books and iPads (internet).

After students had collected enough information and understood with mastery the concepts of force, motion and balanced, they worked together to design a new game using what they learned.

Throughout the project, to cement their learning and connect ideas, students used iPads to collect observations via several apps including the camera and other platforms. Once the teams completed their research, they used Educreations to draw out a blue print of their activity. Then they worked as a team to build a model using various materials in the classroom and donated by families. In order to collect all of the information and the process, students created a PicCollage of their learning activities. They also created a Tellagami to explain how their game would be played. 

Once all of the pieces were finished, the teams created a video using Videolicious, inserting all of their previous files and recording their voices to explain the project in order to present their ideas to the PE teacher and to the rest of the school. 

The final presentation not only showcased the solution students came to for the initial problem, but captured the learning and integration that happened throughout the entire learning event.

Here is one example of the many projects completed by Hatfield Elementary's second grade led by Nicole Wallis:

Click here to see the full video presentation.