Let's face it, sometimes facts need to be shared. Sometimes the facts are insignificant to the big picture of life in terms of memorization, but they are significant to the understanding of a skill that is being taught.
This particularly comes to mind when pairing fiction and non-fiction.
A BB second grade teacher paired the book Sparky and Eddie: The First Day of School with a non-fiction piece about beetles. She happens to have a beetle like the one in the book (science buff/ animal lover).
She took a picture of that beetle and gave the ChatterPix app access to her camera roll. On the picture she can draw a little line-of-a-mouth with her finger. That little line becomes a mouth. The app gives her 30 seconds to record audio.
Now when students "play" the 30 second clip, it looks like the beetle is talking and telling his story/ sharing his facts. And though the teacher created this first one, now the kids know how to create a ChatterPix character. (Trust me, it is remarkably kid-friendly and simple.) From now on this tiny piece of tech can be inserted wherever needed, and it's tech in kids' hands... not tech in teachers' hands.
Project Lead the Way STEM modules often have tradebooks in the mix. Thinking about the pairing of those tradebooks with other text is one more way to layer-in other content areas with PLTW.
Oh... if you're a little further down the road in your tech understanding... this is great for app smashing, too!
This particularly comes to mind when pairing fiction and non-fiction.
A BB second grade teacher paired the book Sparky and Eddie: The First Day of School with a non-fiction piece about beetles. She happens to have a beetle like the one in the book (science buff/ animal lover).
She took a picture of that beetle and gave the ChatterPix app access to her camera roll. On the picture she can draw a little line-of-a-mouth with her finger. That little line becomes a mouth. The app gives her 30 seconds to record audio.
Now when students "play" the 30 second clip, it looks like the beetle is talking and telling his story/ sharing his facts. And though the teacher created this first one, now the kids know how to create a ChatterPix character. (Trust me, it is remarkably kid-friendly and simple.) From now on this tiny piece of tech can be inserted wherever needed, and it's tech in kids' hands... not tech in teachers' hands.
Project Lead the Way STEM modules often have tradebooks in the mix. Thinking about the pairing of those tradebooks with other text is one more way to layer-in other content areas with PLTW.
Oh... if you're a little further down the road in your tech understanding... this is great for app smashing, too!