Weekly Tech-y News

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Weekly Tech-y News Feb 12-16

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Acrostic Poems in PicCollage Kids

A huge shout out to Ms. Avery at Highland, and the awesome acrostic poems her 1st/2nd grade combo kids made using the free app PicCollage Kids. Check out the amazingly creative examples below.

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss PicCollages!

After seeing this super fun idea on Mrs. Goodwin's awesome Instagram account, I decided we needed to try this project in kindergarten this morning! It turned out to be really fun and pretty simple, if you're familiar with the easy to use, FREE, and amazing app PicCollage Kids. Students took a selfie, then used the doodle tool to draw on top of the photo and add a cat nose, whiskers and Cat in the Hat style hat. They customized their collages with fun backgrounds, fancy text (we all wrote "Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!", but older students could write their favorite stories or characters) and birthday stickers (I let them choose 2). The collages are easily saved to the iPad camera roll and shared on Seesaw! Happy birthday, Dr. Seuss!

#PicCollageChat

I was so excited to host the first ever #PicCollageChat, and chat with other teachers who love the app PicCollage as much as I do, or who wanted to learn about using it in their classrooms. So many awesome ideas were shared! Check them out here!

Weekly Tech-y News!

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More App Smash Fun!

I love how the first grade teachers at Beartooth took my earlier PicCollage Kids + Number Pieces idea and made it even better! You can read my original post here. Instead of having their students just build two digit numbers, they added another level of awesomeness by having their students add their two digit numbers together and solve the equation! They used the FREE apps PicCollage Kids, Number Pieces and Seesaw to accomplish this. Great work!

Infuse IEFA with Technology!

This week I used some wonderful stories selected by OPI to support Indian Education for All, and infused these lessons with technology in kindergarten and 1st grade classrooms. Keep reading for ideas you can use in your own classrooms!

Weekly Tech-y News!

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PicCollage Kids + ChatterPix Kids + Seesaw Superbowl App Smash!

I posted a few fun Superbowl activities in an earlier post that you can read about here, but I also wanted to share a fun app smash project we did in Mrs. Johnson and Ms. Romersa's first grades today! We used the free apps PicCollage Kids and ChatterPix Kids, then posted to Seesaw. Read on to see our fun app smash (and remember you can use this same technique in other areas - think Groundhog Day)!

Weekly Tech-y News

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Math Learning Center Apps + PicCollage Kids

The FREE apps offered by the Math Learning Center are some of my absolute favorites for practicing math skills in the classroom. They are digital interactive manipulatives that allow students to practice math problem solving, then save and share their work and thinking. If you haven't checked them out yet, I encourage you to do so! There are web apps (usable from your computer to project onto an interactive whiteboard and do whole class) or iPad apps available. The web apps can even be used on Chromebooks by students.

In first grade, we used these apps plus one of my favorites - PicCollage Kids - to make math collages of students building tens and ones. Read on to see what we did!

Groundhog Day Ideas for your Techy Classroom!

One of my favorite holidays to "celebrate" with students is Groundhog Day. There are so many fun books to read, and I love how you can incorporate science, weather and making predictions into these lessons. One of my favorite "techy" ideas is to have students use the free app PicCollage Kids to create a prediction collage and then upload to Seesaw. Continue reading to see details, plus a list of other fun Groundhog Day activities for your classroom.

Giraffes Can't Dance

A goal for us as teachers should be instilling a growth mindset in our students. Teaching them to problem solve, think critically and persevere are lifelong skills. There are some wonderful resources for teaching this to our students, including Becky Berg’s wonderful series, as well as Class Dojo’s Big Ideas videos. I love the story Giraffes Can’t Dance by Giles Andreae to teach about the power of yet. Check out this idea of making a “yet” collage using the free app PicCollage Kids.

Weekly Tech-y Newsletter

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The blog Erintegration has the most creative ideas for using technology in the classroom, particularly the free app PicCollage Kids. Today in Mrs. Westrope's first grade we used her "digital leaf man" idea after reading the story Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert. (Always a favorite fall read aloud.) The first graders brainstormed different "leaf things" they could make ... leaf dogs, leaf fish and leaf cats led to leaf princesses and leaf kings. :) Let the kids be creative ... the more fun they have, the more motivated they would be to make a digital story out of this later using a tool like Seesaw, Adobe Spark Video or Puppet Edu (all FREE!). Click the image above to read her instructions or keep reading below to see some examples from Mrs. Westrope's class.

Bat Facts with PicCollage Kids

I love using the apps PicCollage Kids and Seesaw to have students publish facts that they've learned about a topic. Here are some examples from Mrs. Davey's 1st grade. They studied bats and then wrote "Bats can, Bats have, and Bats are" sentences about bats. We used the web search tool in PicCollage Kids to find images of bats.

Big Pumpkin Activities using FREE iPad Apps!

Thanks to my friend Mrs. Peel, this is my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE EVER Halloween story to read with students. It also might have something to do with this jaunty little song (I do a spot on impersonation of the Mummy) that goes along with the story.

At any rate, I love it, and so do kids! Using this story as the basis for some story comprehension makes this skill fun and engaging. Throwing in some good, FREE iPad apps doesn't hurt, either. Read on to find out about some of the activities we did in kindergarten and 1st grade this week using our interactive whiteboards, PicCollage Kids, Chatterpix Kids, Shadow Puppet Edu and (of course) Seesaw!

I Am Collages with PicCollage Kids & Seesaw

There are so many amazing ways to use images in PicCollage Kids as graphic organizers to allow students to add their own information for inquiry, reading comprehension, and math. This I Am collage idea from Erintegration is a super fun way to introduce this method and encourage students to write, be creative and tell about themselves. I downloaded the FREE instructions from her Tpt store, but I changed it a bit. Instead of using a QR code to have the students scan and download images, I put the images into Seesaw for students to access. Keep reading to find out how.

Back to School Newsletter Using Seesaw!

I absolutely LOVE this idea from Angela Gadtke from Seesaw.  She has created a back to school letter template that can be posted on Seesaw and scanned using the Seesaw QR code feature.  This would be a fun way to introduce students and parents to Seesaw, as well as a fun "meet the teacher" intro!  Click the image to be taken to an editable Google Drawing with instructions on how to use this template.

Another idea is to create an "about me" collage using the free app Pic Collage for Kids, then post this to Seesaw and provide parents and students with the Seesaw QR code to scan.  Here's an example of that idea from Kami Butterfield.