Touchscreen Learning

We are fortunate to have a cart of iPads at Maple Lake Elementary, which any teacher is free to check out and use.  We will be using them as much as possible this year.  

Why use iPads with Kindergarten students?

They are tools - just like paper, pencils, crayons, and glue.  We use all of our educational tools to create, demonstrate, collaborate, and publish.

Many in this generation of students have grown up with touch screens and naturally have a high interest in using them.  At school, they become learning tools with endless possibilities!

We have already explored three apps.

 I posted about Splash Math Kindergarten here.

We played a bit with Sock Puppets, an app that we may use in the future for retelling stories we read.

Students met with me in small groups to use the ShowMe app.  I loaded pictures of a familiar text with drawings added by each student, and we have been recording some echo reading. This demonstrates the students' skills of beginning fluency (reading like we naturally talk), one-to-one correspondence (pointing to the words while reading), and directionality on the page of a written text (starting on the left and moving to the right).  

See an example here:

        

I look forward to completing a ShowMe with every student and sharing them with you!