This past week I was fortunate enough to get iPads for my classroom! My school district is turning digital by Jan. 2015. Well, the middle school and high school are, and eventually (maybe?) the elementary school. I am lucky enough to be a phase 1 teacher in the elementary building who gets to try the iPads out! There are only four of us in the elementary building and we need to determine if iPads have a place at the elementary level. Do any of you have experience with iPads in your elementary classroom? Any words of advice or opinions are greatly appreciated :). Just leave them below in the comment section...
As far as numbers, I have a cart of 30 iPads that I share with a 3rd grade teacher. I decide to take 12 a day and leave enough for him to have one per a student. I have a class of 24, so I'm letting them work in partners. I also leave them out at center time and since they are new to our room, I introduced them to handling the iPad and using the App Spelling City. They are used to using this website, so it was a great App to start off with!
My goal is to use the iPads throughout the day. A friend of mine, another phase 1 teacher in 4th grade, has his students keep them on their desks, so they use them throughout the day. At first, I wasn't sure if this is ideal for 2nd grade. I'm still not sure yet, but boy was it fun to to have them use the Socrative App during math class on Friday! If you're not familiar with that App, it allows students to answer teacher probed questions and results can show up on the classroom ActiveBoard screen after students respond on their iPads. Wish I would have taken a picture of that! And let me tell you, 100% of the students were engaged!
My next goal is to get students using the QR Reader App. I've seen lots of neat freebies on TpT that have students using QR codes that I want to try out. A big, common core aligned, writing project that I have my students do in second grade is research an animal. With that in mind, and my desire to use QR codes, I created a few products related to animal researching Students get to use the QR Reader App and the Croak.it! App to research their animal and present their animals with the use of QR codes. I can't wait to get pictures of that to post!
Until then, if you use iPads please check out the products below that I created. Also, if you have suggestions for iPad use at the elementary level, I'd love to hear from you :).
Thanks for reading! Until next time! :)...
