The following is a guest post shared by Alex Caram, Elementary Media Specialist with Summer Street School in Lynnfield, MA. A special thanks to her for sharing her ideas and experiences!
Activities Easy Enough for Kindergartners
This year we were lucky enough to get ten iPads for student use. They currently live in a beautiful cart in the library media center. Over the summer a few of us spent a good amount of time vetting apps for student use, making sure to keep teaching and learning in mind when selecting which ones we would download. Then school started. The iPads, while an exciting addition to the school community, became yet another thing for overwhelmed teachers to tackle.
Combining PicCollage & Adobe Spark Video
It became clear to me that the only way to get teachers to buy into using the iPads with their class was to focus on a small aspect of the curriculum and one or two apps. This year PicCollage and Adobe Spark Voice have been those apps at Summer Street School. After luring a third grade teacher into using Voice with her students to record poetry, I shared this document with the rest of the school, as proof that amazing student work can be created using the iPads in a timely manner. After sharing the document, teachers began expressing interest, but again were overwhelmed with how to integrate it into their curriculum.
Creating Shape Stories
And that’s how the kindergarten Shape Story began! If kindergartners can do it, and do it -any student in your school can. Often teachers think the project has to be huge, but technology works for even the smallest thing, like talking about 2D shapes.
In the first of two 40 minutes sessions, the kindergartners worked collaboratively to find shapes around the school and took photographs of them using the PicCollage app. The students also used the text feature to label the different shapes and added a photograph of themselves to finish off the collage. Here are a few examples. During the second session the students used Adobe Voice to record themselves explaining what they knew about one or two shapes and where they found them in the school. The result is posted here, and for a first go around with kindergarten, the teacher and I couldn’t be happier.
Reflecting on the Activity
In retrospect, this activity could have been more successful if it were more focused. If we had students, who did work in groups, focus in on one shape, we could have assigned more simple shapes to some students, while challenging others with a more complex shape. This would have also made recording easier, as recordings in Adobe can’t be paused or edited. Therefore, focusing in on one shape would allow the students to focus their thoughts, and not have to completely redo a recording to add an additional idea.
PicCollage is free and easy to use. The final collages save to your camera roll, which makes it easy to bring the final product into another app, like Voice. Voice is also free and creates a beautiful, professional looking video as a final product. Before we started the recording session, I uploaded the collages, which were in the camera roll, into Voice for the sake of time. Older elementary students, however, can easily upload images into Voice. Additionally, Voice allows for quite a few customization choices in terms of theme, music, and font. I made these selections for the kindergartners, but older students, see the example above, have enjoyed personalizing their videos.
