Creation Day! On Tuesday we started in Book Creator – this has been my favorite app for the past few months. There is SO much that can be done with it. I’ve used it to have students create short stories that were emailed to me and combined into a class book. We made end-of-the-year class books in second grade with students reflecting on their favorite activities throughout the year; third graders wrote and illustrated a favorite piece of writing. The possibilities are endless!

But on this day, we had to each create our own book. Why do I always have ideas in my head till someone says, “Let’s try to finish a book and be ready to share in about 40 minutes.” So, like some students, I just sat there for quite awhile trying to figure out what to do! Eventually I decided to write a book about using the Kidblog App on the iPad for the teachers at our school. I took screenshots and used Skitch to annotate. Here’s the “almost” finished product (I need to add more to discuss approving posts and comments).

Using KidBlog with iPads

To download and read on an iOS device in iBooks, tap on the above link > Download > Open in iBooks.

To read on a computer, you must use the Google Chrome browser and the Readium app. Refer to the post, Book Creator and the Readium Chrome Web App for more information.

Working hard!

The next project was iMovie. For some reason, the trailers have always been a source of frustration to me so I was determined to create one. Although we had plenty of time, I returned to the hotel and finally finished at 10:30. It may not be terrific to others but I’m proud of it!

iPad Adventures from Trinity Valley School on Vimeo.

My favorite part was sharing time. I love seeing other people’s creativity and the projects shared were fantastic. It’s such a wonderful way to get ideas. Some of the Book Creator projects included:

• Introducing members of a department
• Clemson – South Carolina rivalry which included YouTube videos
• Why I Love Athens, GA (What a fun way to share information about a city with another class across the country!)

Our third day was spent working with GarageBand and discussing workflow. Great ideas using Google Drive (wish I could use this with at least 4th graders but not sure if our tech staff would approve that!).

Shawn challenged us with several statements and questions:

• Does your class reward innovation?
• Make learning meaningful for everyone!
• Where do you want to be in the next 5 days? (Revisit the basic skills; continue to practice what we did during the conference)
• Where do you want to be in 5 weeks? (Think about a unit, a presentation, etc for this time period. Find something to wow the students or teachers; to get them on board.)
• Where do you want to be in 5 months? (Where are you going? What do you want your students to be able to do at this point? Think big!)

My goals for the summer:

• Get familiar with Evernote in order to organize materials.
• Create “training” ePub books for teachers in the Book Creator app.
• Practice making iMovie trailers so I can get faster at putting one together.

The conference was excellent. Wish we’d had more time for some of the other apps that we were asked to install (Penultimate, TouchApp Creator). I should add those to my goals as well! I’m hoping for a long summer . . .