Amazing writers

Michelle and I constantly attempt to innovate and think about new (or better) ways we can use Explain Everything to assist our learners.

One of the things that is holding back some of our learners in writing, is they fail to remember their whole story, so get part way through writing and forget what great idea they had and therefore what goes next.  Last Wednesday while I was at University, Michelle trialled them recording their story using their voice and then using this to play back again and again as they wrote.  It seems to have been a success although early days yet!

Accompanying this, we have allowed learners the opportunity to type their story.  Some still prefer to use their book, but some have taken to the typing and can actually create a much longer story using the keyboard than they would using a traditional pen and paper.  In fact, on Friday, we had a spare twenty minutes to our day, and when given a choice, some learners chose to write on their iPads as their 'free choice' activity!  With some amazing results.  These stories were not scaffolded at all - they were able to write about whatever they wished.  I had a few requests for "how do you spell this" but the ideas, the structure and the location of many of the words were done independently by the learners.  I was amazed with what they created!  

We will continue to offer the keyboard option on some occasions, particularly when we get results like this:

Subtraction .... with Explain Everything!

One of the many things I find so amazing about the Explain Everything app is you can do so much with it - limited only by the ability to "dream up" ideas!  We've moved onto subtraction in maths and last weekend I was trying to come up with something more engaging that writing problems on the board or taking three bears away from five bears.  Hoping for inspiration I grabbed a coffee and some cookies to inspire me ... and another Explain Everything project was born!  What if I had five cookies and Cookie Monster stole two of them?  How many would I have left?

I created a multi slide project with the first slide containing both the visuals and an audio explanation of how to complete each slide.  We watched this slide as a whole class at the beginning of the first lesson and then completed some of the follow up equations, again as a whole class - having the iPad airplay to the Apple TV ensured everyone could see! The rewindable nature of the "teaching" slide ensured students could go back to this during the week.

        
Oh, and after students master subtraction from 5, what comes next?  Fish of course!

        

..... and more Explain Everything!

I can fast see this being our "go to" app as it has so many uses!  Today Michelle and I briefly brainstormed some ways we wanted to use this over the coming weeks:

• Number 1 - 9 for students to trace over (useful for students that cannot form their numbers yet) - students can say the numbers as they trace over them
• Numbers 1 - 5 for students to put in the correct order - again students can say the number as they put them in order
• Before/After numbers for students to move the numbers to the correct place
• Full alphabet for students to trace over as they say the alphabet
• All the lower case letters for students to use to make High Frequency Words

Today we introduced the Google Drive to the students as a way to share a EE project for them to work on which we have previously created.  The instructions worked really well and students were immediately engaged at their individual level (some students were tracing over numbers as they said them, some were sorting numbers into the correct order while others were concentrating on before/after).  The great thing about this was different students could be working on the same activity and we were able to look at their learning later in the day and review what they had done!  We also had students that were able to find a quiet place in the room and share what they had achieved.  This sample completed by Kahurangi was one of these - he completed it independently after a teacher led session!

Other work was collected while working with the teacher:

And this sample was completed independently after first working with the teacher:

Progress already ...

Today we again discussed our weekends with Michelle and I modelling the conversation that we wanted the students to have with peers about what they did.  This was much more successful today with most students sharing with their partner and all students able to tell the whole class what they did on the weekend - woohoo for progress!  Then we recorded the students stories in their writing book and each student copied this text underneath before videoing their story.  All students were able to recite at least one sentence of their story to the video including students who had previously refused to be videoed).  Its great to be able to see progress so quickly with students now more willing to not only share orally but also be recorded!