Alien Assignment

Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning & Children's Media has created several apps for young children. My favorite is Alien Assignment. It's a free app available in the Apple app store (it's an iPhone app bus can be used on the iPad or iPod as well- iOS 4.3 or later). Children are introduced to the Gloop family of aliens whose ship has crashed landed and who need the child's help to fix it.


Through the camera feature on the device, children are asked to find objects and photograph them as examples of items the aliens could use to replace the broken parts of their ship. Directions are spoken and children must pay close attention so that they know what their photo assignment is. The open-ended assignments can lead to some
creative and out-of-the-box thinking when children are looking around the room. For example, the assignment to find something with buttons led to kindergartners locating buttons on classroom snowmen, a teacher's sweater, and the keyboard of the computer. Children can then be asked to justify their choices when reviewing their photos with an adult.

This one, simple, free app encourages active listening, following directions, creativity, critical thinking,
reasoning, problem solving, and camera use. It is recommended for ages 4 and up and would be an excellent choice for grades K-2. Extension activities could include partners assigning each other items to find and photograph or having children write their explanations for their photo choices.

Aurasma is amazing

When you hear someone say augmented reality, you may imagine a future time where hologram phones beam the person you're speaking with right into your livingroom. While we're not there yet, augmented reality is a real and useful tool for learning and sharing information.

Through Aurasma, a free iPad app, students in 6th grade created video overlays for their wall display of frequently misspelled words.  Aurasma works by using a still image as a trigger point. When you're logged into the app and you hover over the trigger image, the student-created video content begins playing automatically and appears to be hovering in space above the trigger.

For FSCU teachers, you can access our instruction sheet through this link.

In the case of this 6th grade group, students were creating the overlays or "auras" but there are lots of ways that teacher-created auras could be useful.  For example, if your students have access to a device with the Aurasma app at home or in school, they can use them as an extra helper in their independent work. The teacher can create a video demonstrating how to work through a math problem and when the student hovers their device over the problem, the teacher's explanation video would appear to help them. Conversely, students could each create an aura of themselves working through a problem and then have a classmate watch it and confirm if they did it correctly.

Unlike using a QR code and code reader to take you to a specific URL, the Aurasma app contains the video or animation in one place and can be kept private or public at the users' discretion. Augmented reality and Aurasma are being used to enhance customer experiences. Check out the way Marvel Comics has incorporated it into their content:

Try hovering your Aurasma app over logos of most professional sports teams and instantly find info on the team, key players or the team's twitter feed. Corporate marketing is already diving into augmented reality- give your students the tools and knowledge to create this content themselves!

Getting Started with iPads in Kindergarten

For the first time bringing out iPads in kindergarten, we decided to make it a "Teacher Table" center that groups of four would rotate through. This worked well since work centers are already a part of the classroom routine. With only 10-15 minutes per group, we were able to cover some basics and allow the students to focus on working with one app.

Students first washed and dried their hands (it was kindergarten after snack time). When they first sat down, I had the stack of iPads in front of me and introduced the home button. Although many students had already used iPads, this common language of calling it the "home button" is important to clarify. Then I gave each student an iPad and once they'd swiped it on, had them practice with the volume button. We set all of the iPads to mute and talked about why this was important if we didn't have headphones and were all using our own iPads.

For the first app, we used the free Geoboard. Since actual geoboards were one of the other stations, it was the perfect time to talk about how they were similar and also discuss the differences. This free app never runs out of rubber bands, they never break, they can stretch an infinite amount and the shapes can be colored in.

That's it. We didn't use any bells or whistles, there were few directions and no one was named the winner, but it didn't matter. The students were creating patterns, shapes and designs of their own and challenging their friends to do the same.

ShowMe

This iPad app acts like an interactive whiteboard on your iPad. You can import or capture pictures and then write on them, record themselves describing them, or have students talk through and show through drawing and photos how they solve a math or science problem.
If you have an Apple TV, ask students to share their ShowMe with the whole class.

Great app for: showing math work, drawing, explaining reasoning.

Top Notes app

TopNotes is an iPad app that allows you to take notes, insert images, highlight and more all within the app. Pair with an Apple TV and allow your students to show their work with the class. Does not have the recording capability of ShowMe, but it's very easy to use.

The demo video shows the process of opening the app, creating a note, & inserting a photo. If you still have questions, let me know and I'll come by your classroom for a live demo!

Great app for: showing math work, storytelling, annotating images.