This week's question is "Can I Integrate Mobile Technology into My Educational Setting?"  Type a blog post that describes...

• your thoughts on integrating mobile technology and how they may have changed during this class,
• your thoughts on whether or not ED 610 has been helpful for you, and
• your thoughts on topics that should or should not have been included in ED 610.

This class has opened a whole new world for me in terms of integrating mobile technology into my classroom! It has opened my eyes to the vast amount of educational, productivity, and presentation apps available for my use. Five weeks ago, I said this in my first post: "I hope to learn how to more effectively use my iPad for educational purposes. I hope to become aware of other forms of mobile technology that can be integrated in a kindergarten classroom. I would like to see how other teachers use these forms of technology in their classroom, discover new apps to use, and further branch out into other such realms." I feel like I have indeed learned how to more effectively use my iPad in my kindergarten classroom. In fact, just yesterday I met with a fellow kindergarten teacher who said she was tired of doing the "All About Me" beginning of the year project the same way she has done for years and wanted something new. I jumped at the opportunity to tell her of my final project for this class and the plans I have to help the students create such a presentation about themselves. She really liked the idea and will probably do it with her class, too. We also talked about the Listen to Reading component of the Daily 5, and I showed her the myriad of books I have on my iPad for my students to read. She was impressed that listening to reading can happen outside of a CD/tape player and headphones. We talked about me writing a grant to get more iPads in my classroom to further learning. There are so many other ways I can integrate mobile technology with my kindergarteners, and I feel like this class has provided me with many tools and references to use as I embark on this journey.

Through this class, I have greatly enjoyed participating in the App of the Week discussions, reading other teachers' blogs, and learning how they use technology in their own classrooms. I have discovered many more apps to use myself, or ones that I can pass on to my colleagues. Thanks to everyone who has shared and participated - I have learned a lot! For that reason, I can definitely say that ED 610 has been extremely helpful to me, as well as a class that I thoroughly enjoyed. It is my third online class I've taken (I have one more during Summer 3), and it is my favorite online class that I've taken. It is one of my favorite grad classes; my other favorite one was with Dr. Smith (can't remember the course name, but we were outdoors a lot learning about different flowers and plants.) I believe the set-up of this class is how online classes should be. The instructor was a fabulous facilitator and I learned so much from the other people enrolled in the class as well as my own exploration. I hope that I somehow still have access to things after this class ends, or else I'm going to have to start making lists and bookmarking web pages pretty quickly!

With ED 610 being only five weeks long, a lot was jammed into our time together. I felt that there was a good balance of topics in the class. I especially enjoyed learning about the presentation apps, since I didn't even know things like that existed! That was definitely my favorite part. I also liked how we were able to create our first presentation on anything. That made it easier, being the first time I ever did anything like this. I am glad that our final project is supposed to be something useful for classroom use. I am excited to use what I've learned!

My five year old Stephen brought me the book The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse today. He told me he could read it. After he did it once, we used Doceri on my iPad to take pictures of the pages and record him reading it. Click to hear him reading this story! I think it takes Windows Media Player to work. Enjoy! :)

This week's question is "Are There Educational Apps For My Learners?"  Type a blog post that describes...

• your prior experiences with mobile tools that help your learners,
• your thoughts about learners using mobile devices in the classroom
  

My whole world opened up to mobile devices this past school year when I received a school-issued iPad...it was like the skies parted and heavenly voices began to sing! The original purpose of these iPads was to be able to do DIBELS assessments on our students, sync them to mClass, and have access to all of the included mClass tools. (DIBELS, for those of you who don't know, means Dynamic Indicator of Basic Early Literacy Skills...letter naming fluency, nonsense word fluency, reading comprehension, etc.) But our principal also generously gave each of us an iTunes gift card with instructions to look for apps that we could use in our classrooms. Wowsers! Thankfully there are PLENTY of free apps, but I did use that iTunes card to judiciously purchase some apps (and believe it or not, there is still about $4 credit on it!). Once the iPads entered our world, many of us really went to work looking for the best apps for our kiddos. We had "Constructive Coffees" once a month where different teachers would present on different topics, and quite a few of these topics centered around the iPads. We had Tech Tuesdays where we could go hang out with the tech people and enhance our knowledge of technological devices. Through all this, I became a firm believer that mobile tools can definitely help learners. Of course, there are always drawbacks...like the fact that I just had ONE iPad and a class of 22...but I still found creative ways to use it. I had no projector or SmartBoard or anything yet, and I was still in 4th grade. This upcoming year I will have a projector with a SmartBoard and will now be in kindergarten...lots of changes over the course of one year. Last year, my 4th graders were encouraged to bring their own devices to school on the day they had Computer class. At the end of class, the teacher let them work with their own devices. Not everyone had one to bring, but he had extras on hand for individuals or groups to borrow...and the kids LOVED that. During recess, if we were indoors due to weather, I let them on their devices on that day only. Granted, at that time they just wanted to play Minecraft and had to be encouraged to do something educational...but then, even the educational things sometimes just seemed like fun to them! I had a student last year who was allowed to have 10 minutes at the end of the day to play on my iPad if he had a good day. Talk about motivation! And I made sure I had plenty of educational apps on there for him to use. When we were talking about glaciers, erratics, and glacial grooves in science class, I looked up images of those and passed the iPad around the class. I'm looking forward to being able to do much more this year with the projector and SmartBoard. But with moving to kindergarten this year come other challenges...like NOW how do I use the iPad effectively? One way that I'm looking at involves using it during The Daily Five. As their website says, "The Daily 5™ is a series of literacy tasks which students complete daily while the teacher meets with small groups or confers with individuals. The Daily Five involves five aspects of literacy- Read to Self, Read to Someone, Listen to Reading, Work on Writing, and Word Work. Now, I've never used The Daily Five before, but the teachers at my school who use it just love it! I have the book (on my Kindle on my iPad of course) and am working through it. But back to how the iPad can be used...throughout the summer, I have been working on finding books (preferably free) that can be used during the Listen to Reading section and I've been putting them on my iPad. Currently I have 39, and that doesn't count the individual books under some apps like Booksy, Reading Rainbow, and Stella & Sam. My five year old has been kid-testing them, and he just loves listening to the books being read to him! He comes and tells me interesting facts that he's learned, and when I ask him where he learned it, he tells me that he read it on my iPad! Although someone else is reading it to him, he links that idea to HIM reading...and I like that very much. Now, at the moment, I still just have one iPad, but it could be used for a small group of children at a time. Plus I know there are ways to write grants, etc. and get more iPads or other devices. I will need to work on that. But what I do know is this - students as young as five years old can and do use mobile devices, such as iPads, to learn in the classroom. All we have to do is be the facilitators of this learning, and a whole world can then open up to them as well.