Practice for AZELLA Testing

In Arizona, students learning English as a Second Language are required to take a state assessment called AZELLA to check their progress in learning english. Prior to taking the test, teachers often have students practice some of the types of skills and activities they will see on the test. They are provided some resources for this but one teacher decided she needed more and wanted them to be more engaging for the students. She used the Pic Collage app to create these practice activities for writing. Much better than black and white practice prompts!

App of the Week - RWT Timeline

Read*Write*Think (http://www.readwritethink.org/) is a great website for ideas, resources, lesson plans, and tools to support reading and language arts. They have some useful online student interactives to support students in showing what they know.

Over the past couple of years RWT has also been developing iPad apps aligned with a variety of their student interactives. The RWT Timeline app is a great tool for creating projects showing sequential order arranged by date, time, or event. Timelines can include both images and descriptive text.

Click here to download the RWT Timeline pdf.

Informational Texts and Newsela

The Arizona College and Career Ready Standards (Common Core) require a greater balance between reading fiction and non-fiction in the classroom. In addition, we want students to be reading nonfiction content that is relevant to their lives and interests.

Last year we discovered Newsela (https://newsela.com/). Newsela is a site that brings daily news into the classroom and provides a way to foster reading comprehension. The news articles are from major publications and rewritten at different Lexile Levels. All students in a classroom can read the same content but at a level that is appropriate for them. The articles are of high interest and cover a wide variety of topics including science, health, money, and sports. The texts are common core aligned and many have quizzes to test comprehension and close reading. There are both free and premium accounts.

Newsela is quick and easy to use. Teachers register, create classes, and add students. Teachers can assign specific articles that are automatically leveled for the grade level of the class. When students log in they see the article(s) that have been assigned and can start reading.

Last week I visited a classroom where the teacher had just begun using Newsela with her students. She was really excited about being able to deliver this type of content to the students. The teacher had created her account and set up the class so the students could get log-ins. It's very engaging for the students and works well on the iPads!

         

Click here to view the Newsela Quick Start Guide for Teachers.

Enjoy!

QR Codes in the Classroom

Last year we introduced QR Codes to our flip learning teachers during a monthly PLC. It was one of their favorite PLC meetings and quickly became one of the best loved tools in their toolbox! During our summer PD, we also introduced the new group of iPad flip learning teachers to QR Codes.


Here are some ways the teachers have found to use QR Codes in their Classrooms:


Scan a code to get the correct answer to a problem. Teachers create a text QR Code that contains the answers to the math problems being worked on in the classroom. Students can self-check their answers and move on when correct or go back and figures out where they went wrong.

       

Scan a Code for a math word problem. Teachers again created text based QR Codes with math word problems for the student to access and work on in class.

       

Scan a Code to answer the question: "Teacher I'm finished, what should I do now?" One of the proverbial problems - how to keep students busy when they finished their work early or more quickly than others. This teacher has sets of QR Codes posted around the room. Students know that when they finish early they can go scan a code with the activity for them to complete.

Scan a Code to be taken to a learning website. A quick and easy way to share web addresses with students - and you don't have to worry about anyone typing in the URL incorrectly!

       

Scan a Code to be taken to an online video. Students can quickly scan the QR Code to access online videos to help them better understand concepts. It could also be a link to the teacher's flip learning video lesson!

       

Scan a Code to hear an audio recorded book trailer. Instead of traditional book reports, students create audio recordings after reading a book. In this project students use the Croak.it app to recording their book reflections. Corak.it gives them a URL that can be used to create the QR  Codes. Codes can be posted in the room, as in this example, posted online, or placed in the book for others to scan and listen before checking out the book.

Scan a Code to go to an online article to read. Students can access up to date, current materials for reading - saves paper!

       

Scan a Code to download an online worksheet.Why print out worksheets? Have students use a QR Code to download the worksheet into an annotation app on their iPads!

       

Now you try. Here are some of the codes we have used during our PD and PLC's.

       

       

         

Looking forward to more QR Codes adventures for the 2014-15 school year!

An Exciting First Week

The 2014-15 school year is off to a great start. Students have shown up and are eager to learn - especially learning with their iPads. Some of them even hugged their iPads when they got them out for the first time! Here's a peek into what happened the first week in a couple of iPad flip learning classrooms:

2nd Grade:
The teachers introduced the iPads and quickly began having them complete some "apptivities" using various apps, such as Quick Voice Recorder to complete audio recordings. When not being used the procedure in this classroom is to place the iPads on top of their desk name tags.

       

       

5th Grade:
Most of the students in this 5th grade classroom used iPads in 4th grade, so they were very familiar with using them. However, we added some new apps for them over the summer, such as Shadow Puppet Edu, Stick Around, and ABCya Word Cloud. This teacher is great at exploring new apps and figuring out how they can impact learning in her classroom. So for the first day with the iPads, she chose to introduce word clouds to the students using ABCya Word Cloud. The students created word clouds using the names of the students in their classroom and tested out the different ways to change and customize their word clouds.

        

       

       

ISTE 2014 Reflections

Well, it's been a month since returning from ISTE 2014 in Atlanta and it's taken about that long for me to come down from the learning high and have some time to reflect and take it all in. Team Creighton (there were 5 of us this year!) had a great time of learning, listening, discovering, communicating, and even just having some fun.

No matter how many times you attend the conference, it never gets old. There are always so many new things to learn about and new people to meet and make contact with. Here is an overview of our time in Atlanta:

• We did several presentations - 4 in all - and attended a lot of great presentations and poster sessions. Lots of great things to share and implement during the coming year.
• Learned about lots of new online tools and updates to existing ones.
• We met up with old friends, like Dr. Alice Christie, and made new ones - like meeting the developers of our very favorite app - Explain Everything. The developers even came to see our poster presentation where we had examples of student work created in Explain Everything.
• We ate lots of good food, went up to the 72nd floor of the Westin Hotel overlooking the city, and attended some vendor sponsored social events.
• We were sad to leave but ready for next year! ISTE 2015 here we come.

ISTE Conference Here We Come!

I'm leaving on a jet plane. All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go. But I do know when I'll be back again! (Silly reference to a John Denver song - look it up)

We are getting ready to leave for the 2014 ISTE Conference in Atlanta, Georgia (or "Hot"lanta as we have been referring to it - weather mostly, not the night life!). Used to the heat here in Phoenix but the humidity will be a bit different for us.

In addition to all of the learning, collaborating, and communicating, everyone in our group is also presenting: flip classrooms, challenge based learning, creating book trailers with QR Codes. It's always great to share with others and help them be able to replicate projects in their own schools.

Can't wait to get there and meet up with old friends, make new ones, and get great ideas to share with teachers! More to come...

First Grade Fun!

I observed in one of our first grade flipped iPad flipped classrooms this morning. It is always so rewarding to see the great things that are happening with these little ones.

While it wasn't a flipped lesson, the students were completing their literacy centers while the teacher worked on guided reading with small groups of students. It was a combination of both digital learning and more traditional paper and pencil activities.

Students were using the Starfall app to build beginning reading and phonics skills.

Sometimes they sat at their desks but sometimes they choose to sit on the floor.

There was buddy reading of favorite books.

And working on practicing writing and spelling skills.

This first grade classroom is composed of 34 second language learners. The teacher is just plain awesome and keeps everything running smoothly. The students know the class procedures and rules and transitions go so smoothly. It's always refreshing to visit this class!!

Apple Distinguished Program Award Presentation

On February 18, 2014, Brian Peterson and Karla Benge from Apple did an official presentation of the Apple Distinguished Award to the Creighton School District Governing Board and Cabinet. Mr. Peterson shared not only his impressions of iAchieve and how it is impacting students in the classroom but also shared many of the comments made by the reviewers of our application. We felt very honored.

Part of the presentation was to update the governing board on how iAchieve has progress during the 2013/2014 school year. This short video shares some of those highlights.

13-14 iAchieve Governing Board Presentation from Suzanne Sallee on Vimeo.

CSD Governing Board and Superintendent, Director of Technology, and iAchieve Staff

Apple Representatives and iAchieve Staff

Write About This App

One of the apps we have been exploring recently is Write About This. The app is the brainchild of classroom teacher, Brad Wilson. He developed the app because the format was something he wanted for his students to help develop their creative writing skills but could never find.

The full version of the app contains 125 images and 375 text and voice prompts. Each prompt includes three different levels to meet the needs of a variety of students and the prompts align to Common Core Standards. Users can also create their own custom prompts with image and text support.

Students complete their writing assignments right in the app and can share their work in a variety of ways. We are currently using the free version of the app but are looking at purchasing the full version for our 1:1 iPad classroom

Student Examples:
In one of our 1:1 iPad English Language Learner classrooms, the teacher uses Write About This as a warm-up activity for writing. They have set up the app on each iPad to email writing projects directly to the teacher. This allows the teacher to review their work and determine specifically what each student needs to work on in class.

Write About This App of the Week