Lights, Camera, Record! I work with teachers to create and to redefine lessons leveraging technology. We strive to capitalize upon the hardware investment in our district and enable teachers to utilize technology to its full capacity.
Imagining the impossible and making it possible is my daily goal. I educate the teachers I work with on the SAMR (substitution, augmentation, modification, redefinition) philosophy of integrating technology that emphasizes rather than using technology as a digital worksheet, we want to use technology as a way to create creative content.
Primary teachers often struggle with how to leverage technology in meaningful ways that do not take a million hours. That being said, recently I worked with several kindergarten teachers in my district to use Educreations to practice sequencing. Eric Carle’s Brown Bear, Brown Bear is a quintessential sequencing book in kinder. Usually, teachers have students cut out images, order them on a sentence strip, and glue them in order. Well, gone are the days of glue and sticky fingers and paper scraps. Leveraging the ground breaking FREE app, Educreations, we used Matt Gomez’s blog post to retell the story in order to practice and to assess student sequencing.
I assisted the teachers by doing the following prep steps in order to be able to get the images into Educreations:
1) Download his PDF of the Brown Bear images
2) Take screen shots of each animal (shift, command, 4)
3) Upload the images to a shared Google Drive or Drop Box folder or share via airdrop if using IOS 7 (here is the shared google drive folder)
4) Open Drive or Drop Box on the iPad and download the images to the photos app
5) Open Educreations
6) Click the image button, click photos, click camera roll, and add the photos to the Educreations video
We practiced creating a video together, saving it as private, and then emailing it to someone from the Educreations website rather than the app as our shared iPads aren’t set up with emailing capacity.
Excitement and nervousness flooded the teacher’s faces as we finished our short videos. I reassured them that I would be happy to run the iPad Brown Bear station in their class when the time came to create the videos.
The following week, my iPad in tow, I arrived at one of the schools eager to help the darling kinders with their activity. Prepared for class, as all kinder teachers are, the teacher had already logged into her Educreations account on all of the iPads so that the students would be able to save the video (note that the Educreations privacy policy states that children under 13 must have parental permission to create thier own accounts). Additionally, she had saved the Brown Bear images onto the Photo app on each iPad. Students in 4th grade were there to help, which was wonderful, so my role became more of an observer and trouble shooter. The following are the directions that the 4th grade students were given:
1) Open Educreations
2) Insert the Brown Bear images into the video
3) Leave the images out of order
4) Ask your kinder buddy to practice retelling the Brown Bear story
5) Explain to your kind that they will retell the story and move the icons into order
6) Remind them to speak up and say Bye at the end
7) Press record (note that if they make a mistake, just pause, and have them verbally correct themselves)
8) Press pause when the finish
9) Click done
10) Name the video Brown Bear (Student First name)
11) Save it as private
While I completed this activity weeks ago, this is still one of my most favorite lessons of the year. To me the thrill of a parent receiving an email with a video of their child retelling a story is incredible. With technology, we are now able to preserve not only the handwriting of children, but their voice, their laugh, and their learning. Challenge yourself to leverage technology to create digital artifacts that speak to and inspire you.
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