Are you ready to move on from infogaphics to another hot topic? iPads! They are amazing, engaging and kid-friendly. You've probably already seen sites like Kathy Schrock's Bloomin' Apps (iPad apps organized by Bloom's Taxonomy).
And you may have seen this extravaganza of iPad resources that I saw at the Texas Library Association convention. The Texas Computer Educators Association keeps an even more gigantic list of iPad apps for education here.
And if you have plenty of iPads for every student in your library, I am happy for you. I truly am. Not jealous. Hardly at all.
BUT, if you are like me, and you have ONE iPad and feel lucky to have that one, how do you use this lonely little iPad for teaching? Can a solo iPad make an instructional impact?
Yes, there are several ways to use one iPad to teach in your elementary school library. And I'll be sharing ideas with you all this week. Today we'll talk about the first way, the PASS-AROUND!
I bet that you've already figured out the basic idea here--the students will be passing around the iPad and responding to a prompt that you've created. Of course, you'll want to create a prompt that won't be too distracting as you continue with whole group instruction. So this activity is designed for student engagement and data-gathering, NOT higher-level thinking!
Examples: What is your favorite fiction genre? Would you rather read a book or a magazine? If you were starting a research project, where is the first place you would look? How many chapter books do you think we have in our library?
You could use the pass-around to gather data to inform your instruction or to create an infographic for display, or design a question to capture student attention for your lesson. I think that I would have the prompt up on the big screen so that students could look at the question as the iPad moves around the room.
With the Popple lite app (free), students will double tap anywhere on the screen to make a "popple"(a rectangle to type in) pop up. Then they can use the iPad keyboard to type their response. You end up with a big pinboard with everyone's answers on it. When you choose "share," you can email a jpg of the pinboard to yourself.
For more information about how a second grade teacher teaches with one iPad, you can check out "the 1 iPad classroom" podcast from Tech Chefs 4 U (2 ed techs from my school district).
Tomorrow, we'll talk some more about how you can teach with only one iPad. For today, think of a question you would ask for a "pass-around" activity. Then add it to your summer camp scrapbook and share it in a comment here. Together, we're better!
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