Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Using iBooks for Grammar and Connections

This was one of those lessons that seemed very straightforward, and then wasn't! Students were to choose a picture book in iBooks, find a page with text and highlight. The goal was for them to highlight 2 nouns, 2 verbs, and 2 adjectives, all in different colors. Next, they were to open a note and make a connection between that part of the book and themselves or something we had learned about this year.

I had played around withe the highlighting and note feature and it all seemed very straightforward. Problem one occurred because only 1 of the picture books we have in iBooks allows for highlighting and notes.  Apparently I had gotten lucky and tested it out in the only book that worked. So to solve that problem all students had to use the same book. The next problem occurred because this picture book had a lot of words on top of color pictures and the highlighting didn't work in those sections, only in the areas where words were on top of a white background. That limited the students even further. They managed to get all the highlighting done but since there were so few pages to choose from, and since we share iPads, my wonderful parent volunteer had to go in and delete all the highlights between students.

Apparently many students were still on spring break in their minds because they had a very difficult time making a connection. A lot of them seemed to have completely blanked on what that even meant. After much encouragement the task was completed and we had a talk later as a class about how using iPads often provides us (especially me) with daily opportunities for problem solving. So I tried to see this as an opportunity rather than a lesson not to be repeated.

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