Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Secret Messages - How To (Light and Color)

This was fun activity that I got from Roper Mountain Science Institute. They suggested red theater gel to reveal the message, which can get pricy. Another idea I heard was to ask movie theaters to donate left over 3D glasses, which also have a red filter. A guest speaker we had last year said red jello would work. Tried it this week and it worked like a charm. The students thought it was very cool. I found my "attention challenged" students had trouble focusing on making their own secret messages so I was very glad that I had made extra copies of the sheets from the GEMS Color Analyzer book that they could color and then check under the jello.

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.

QR Project - Open House

Twitter Post Link -  https://bit.ly/3Umic7r I saw this adorable QR code project on Twitter and decided to try it out with a couple of third grade classes. We have several schools in our district who are "Leader in Me" schools and I asked a teacher if I could come in and make them for her open house (you don't need to be a "Leader in Me" school but I know they do a lot of goal setting and mission statements). She loved the idea! I decided to use Flip (formally Flipgrid) to do the recording. The web based program is free for educators and automatically generates the needed QR code. We started on a Thursday. I pulled students into the hall to get a picture of them holding a square piece of paper prior to an ELA block. The paper acted as a place holder for the QR code (which is square) and ensured I got the correct hand spacing so the students looked like they were holding the QR code. I found a spot that didn't have anything in the background. The background...