Multitouch Geometry iBook

Success! Last year after I attended the Apple Distinguished Educator workshop, I worked with my class to produce a multitouch book targeted towards younger audiences to teach foundational geometric vocabulary.

After quite a bit of time, it is finally published in the iBooks store.

I am very proud of my students for their hard work and effort to create such a valuable tool. Feel free to check out our 2D geometry book in the iBook store.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear on Educreations

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.

Embarking on iBooks

Fresh off the plane from an intensive week of learning at the Apple Distinguished Educator summit, my adventurous spirit took over and I dove headfirst into a project today. No need to waste time teaching as I did, only need to use time in the new ways I learned from the amazing teachers from South East Asia, Japan, China, Australia and New Zealand.

As we begin the last two months of school, I took my two prep periods today to quickly craft up an iBooks project. After a conference, I always come back overwhelmed and then eager to dive in. Thus, it seems the first day back always becomes the first day of a new project that I figure out and learn alongside my students. Sometimes this way of operating is scary, but more than not it is quite freeing as my students becomes teachers with me. 

Prior to break we finished a unit on introductory geometry. While at the ADE institute in Bali, I delved into create a unit around geometry that utilizes iBooks. In two hours, I put together a quick step-by-step way of implementing this iBooks project. We utilized the following apps and hardware: 

• iPad


• Skitch


• iPad Camera


• MacBook


• iBooks


• GarageBand

Be sure students take photo in the right orientation either vertical or horizontal. 

Overall, I wanted to focus on bringing the languages together that we have at our school. In my classroom, we have Korea, English and Arabic as primary languages. Rather than taking time to create an iBook only for my class, I wanted to focus on creating something that would allow other students to learn basic geometry vocabulary in multiple languages. Thus, the tool we create in my class becomes a tool other teachers can use and download in their classrooms.

As of now, here are the steps. Note that this is truly a work in progress: 

1. Take a photo with Skitch or another photo editing software


2. Draw the shape with a color on Skitch


3. Email the Skitch photo to you or your partner


4. On paper write out definitions of the geometric shapes


5. Write out description in English


6. Write out description in Korean


7. Write out description in Arabic


8. Return iPad and get a computer.


9. Open Garageband.


10. Select podcast.


11. Save it as 5cLanguageiBookShape


12. Do three separate recordings so that you have three individual audio files not three recordings in one file. 


13. First record in English, second in Korean, third in Arabic.


14. Open the iBooks template I Airdropped to you.


15. First thing you need to do is save it as a template


16. Then once you’ve saved it as a template close the window.


17. Now, select new from template chooser


18. Next, save your new file as 5C Names iBooks Geo Shape


19. Finally, replace the content in the book with your own content from the folder you’ve placed the information in on your desktop.