Educreations, safety at school

Here's another Educreations lesson, this time about safety rules at school. Different groups of students created a presentation about safety rules in different places such as school, home, the park, and the street.

Safety at school

Educreations, a lesson in kindness

We spent a lot of time the first few weeks talking about interpersonal skills such as cooperation, compromise, and listening. I asked small groups of students to storyboard 3 of these skills and then turn their storyboard into an Educreations lesson.

working together

Number Talk

One of my favorite less than 5 minute math activities on the iPad is to give students a number and ask them to show me 4 ways to get that number. At the beginning of the year it is usually addition, subtraction, a picture, and tally marks. As we progress through the year students get more creative, combining multi-step problems and multiplication or division.

I usually ask them to do a Number Talk once a week. Any drawing app would work for this. I want students to keep it simple, though, and not spend a lot of time on the bells and whistles, so I use a web clip of www.chalk.37signals.com. There's white chalk, pink chalk, an eraser and that's it.

Tools4Students

I love the Tools4Students app. It has many graphic organizers that I use regularly, without the use of paper and a trip to the xerox machine. One complaint some students have is that they are not careful, push the wrong button, and lose all their work. Here are 2 samples of story responses we've used so far this year.

Popplet about respect

Second grade students tried out Popplet for the first time. We have talked a lot of about class climate, cooperation and respect. I asked them to create a Popplet showing examples of respect for the environment, property, other people, and themselves.

1st and 2nd grade--sentence editing

Toward the end of last year I discovered an app called Daily Sentence Editing. There is an app for each grade level. Instead of editing sentences on paper as we have done in the past, students now edit sentences on the iPads.  Here are samples from the first and second grade apps.

1st grade--plant parts

We are winding down our plant unit. On 2 different days first grade students created iPad projects showing what they have learned about plant parts. One project was created in StoryBuddy, an app they have now used several times and the other project was created in Educreations, which I just introduced them to. I left both assignments fairly open-ended, asking them simply to think about all the plant topics we had talked about and all the things they had observed as they grew grass and wheat.

StoryBuddy projects were 3-7 pages because they had an extended period of time (half hour) to work on them instead of the usual 15-20 minutes. Students were given 45 minutes for their Educreations projects and I asked them to create a storyboard to show me prior to drawing and recording on the iPad.

Educreations plant parts