Educational Apps for My Kindergarteners

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.