Gotta Get This App - Geoboard!

Can we just bond for a moment, as elementary school teachers, about the HORROR that is geoboards?!?!?!

Honestly. I get it... they're great... hands-on learning and all that good stuff... but the rubberbands fly everywhere, and they snap on the kids' fingers, kids are stealing them and you're taking them away from kids for days afterwards... ugh.

This app is the saving grace... Geoboard!

It does exactly what that physical geoboard does - gives you pegs and VIRTUAL (thank god!) rubberbands that you can stretch into shapes.

You can also switch between a small square geoboard and a large rectangular one.

Another cool benefit: you can fill in the shape that you make on the geoboard with a color.

How did I use this app?

My students were learning about area of unusual shapes. We would make the shape on the virtual geoboard, and then use the red rubberbands to trace the individual squares, so they could see how the squares were split in half (or rectangles split in half) and add up the pieces to find the total area.

Go Get This App! ;)

Quickie (but a goodie!) - App of the Week

It's going to be a quickie this time, since I'm in the midst of preparing for parent/teacher conferences!

When using my class iPads this year, I was frustrated by the amount of apps at times. Yes it's cool to have all the apps we have on our student iPads... but every time I wanted to do a new project, I had to build in an extra 30 minutes of instruction to teach them how to use the app I wanted them to use. Yes I could do this at times - but when you think about the 30+ apps on our iPads... that's a lot of minutes!

My solution to this problem was to create "App of the Week."

Each week I choose an app (and I am strategic about my choices, often choosing an app that I know I want to use in the near future for a project) and put its name on the board for the whole week. Then, on Fridays, we have "iPad Free Time" - a time when they have free choice on the iPad (so long as they don't have any missing work). We start out iPad free time with a 5 minute info session.

And who teaches them how to use the "App of the Week"?

Not me - the kids! :)

All week they have seen that app's name on the board, and many of my students are very capable and eager to learn the app on their own. Then, during our iPad time, I choose one student to become the teacher and teach their classmates how to use the app.

Not only has this been a big time-saver for me, but it's been empowering for my students as well!

That's my quickie tip. :) Enjoy!