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iPad Adaptations Project - Keynote


I was working with a second grade class the other day using the Google Pages app (we used/modified the visual report template within Pages to create an animal report) . I was telling the teacher about the "magic move" feature in the Keynote app (free) and how it could be used to create a cute adaptations video.

I created the above sample project to show her and also to test if I thought her second graders could handle it (there is no sound). Her second graders could definitely do it. I think the problems would come up with research and writing.

Students would have to find 5-10 adaptations to highlight (I think I only came up with seven or eight for the penguin in this video). Second graders researching and reading skills are a bit all over the board, which is why I thought this step might need to be differentiated (high readers can pick their own animals, middle readers can choose from a list of animals and you can give them links to find the adaptations,emerging readers have the same option as the middle readers but would work with the teacher to find their animal adaptations within the text). I also find that second graders can write but their sentence structure is still pretty limited. As I was working on the project I saw how easy it was to use the same sentence starter in each slide and I had to conscientiously avoid it. I would definitely recommend using the project to teach students how to choose different sentence starters to vary the structure for readers.

If she goes for the project, I will post some student samples.

On a side note...one of the things I don't like about Keynote and the Magic Move feature is that when you upload it to Google Drive or Google Classroom you lose the animations (darn!). It would need to be graded as is with the student either presenting to you or the classroom.

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