Mrs. Tech

Garage Band is such a fun and free app to use with the iPads! Although it can be loud (especially if your kids start singing to add their own vocals), it is so worth watching them create. I do not know about you, but I love activities that let my students express their creativity. I sometimes create assignments with limited parameters, just to see what they can come up with. This does take excellent classroom management skills (which I only have some days) in order for your students to stay on task and work hard, just be forewarned. Anyways, if you haven't ever used Garage Band, it is pretty self explanatory. First you choose your instrument from keyboard, drummer, drums, guitar, world, amp, strings, bass, and audio recorder. Then you choose one of the options for instrument preference. Then you play around until you get a feel for the instrument. Once you have decided what kind of noise you want to record, you click the red record button at the bottom to record you...

I first started using keynote when we switched to iPads because it gave the students the ability to work like they did on PowerPoint on desktop computers, but on the iPads. When you are using iPads for multiple students, you run into licensing issues with things like Microsoft office where each user requires their own account. Microsoft and Google accounts all require email addresses, which are really tough to assign to elementary age kids. One thing that I always didn't like about being a Microsoft school, was that we didn't have the ability to interact with our students sharing things like Google docs, or at least it wasn't as easy for us as everybody who uses Google classroom. Imagine how excited I was when I found something they can do almost that for my students using the iPads. Collaboration is not a Microsoft specialty, although they are working on some options.  That being said, we thought that Keynote was a good alternative, and it already came on the iPad...

For those of you that do not know, I love to teach coding to my technology students. I don't think that there is any bad that can come out of student having some coding knowledge. Coding also is the base of many careers in many different career fields. That being said, anyone could benefit from knowing some code. I share some of my favorite computer based coding websites in another blog post . This year, though, I have switched from a computer lab to an iPad lab so I set out to find some apps that I could use this year to teach coding. We have Dot & Dash robots that we use to program and combine robotics and code and I talk about how I use them here . I highly recommend the Sololearn Inc apps for Middle and High School students. I used them myself when learning different coding languages to teach little bits to my students and they are super informational and effective. I love how easily I could move through them, and they had great help features for when I got stuck. Ther...

After last weeks fun "About Me" activity  on Pic Collage, I wanted week two to concentrate on the technology side of things. I wanted to know what students think about technology, how much experience they have with it, and how they use it. I decided to use Keynote because it is an easy way to have students interact with technology while answering questions that you give them. It is also easy to add links to additional sites or information through it. I wanted my students to answer questions about technology and then us discuss them as a class. Enter my  Technology Interactive Lesson . I used this in each of my 1-4 grade classrooms, and even though the first graders took longer to spell and type, it was a hit in each class. This is honestly a great introduction activity to see what students already know about technology. There are a few brainstorming questions that ask questions like what they wish technology would do for them! Listen to them and have them share their amaz...

Last summer I was prepping for a summer camp with a programming focus and wasn't finding everything that I needed through websites. What parent wants to pay for their kids to come to camp for 4 hours a day for them to sit in front of a computer the entire time. Even I get restless staring at my computer for that long! I knew that I wanted to keep that programming and coding focus while getting students out of their seats and moving around. Now there are SO many robot choices out there, but I was looking for ones that would run on software that was easily accessible, work on tablets or computers that we already had, and that were reasonably priced. We settled on these and do not regret it. There are apps that we installed on our class devices that are super easy to use. I had first graders using them within minutes of handing the devices over. We used the Go app to start to figure out the robots, and then built from there. The Go app basically just lets the students drive ...

Growing up in Southwest Florida, I am not new to this phenomenon of hurricanes. I've been through them before and remember being nervous, but never being scared. Honestly y'all, this has been one of the scariest weeks of my life.  Everyone is freaking out. Even when we aren't freaking out, the rest of the world is. Josh and I had a decision to make on Wednesday night. We knew we didn't have school Thursday and Friday, and we knew the hurricane was coming this weekend. Evacuate or stay? We made the decision to stay.  Why? I'm sure that's the question on your mind. Well a couple reasons weighed into our decision. First, I have a grandpa who needs 24 hour around-the-clock care. At the time, they said that he need to leave his home on the Fort Lauderdale coast, and evacuate elsewhere. So now he's in Fort Myers and staying with my parents. Second, my dad is a pharmacist, which means he's responsible for being at the hospital when a hurricane hits. He...