Finally, the iPad minis have arrived in Room 12! Near the end of the 2013-14 school year, an opportunity to potentially take part in TLDSB's 2014-15 Inspired Innovation and Technology (IIT for short) program arose and we seized it. With fingers crossed, we submitted our application about how we felt we could use touch screen technology to enhance our Kindergarten programming.
Woohoo! Were we ever excited to hear the news when we came back in September that our application had been selected out of over 160 entries and that we would be receiving 5 iPad minis to use for the entire year! Together, we thought of lots of different ways we could use the iPads in our classroom to help make our learning just a little more 21st century-ish and fun.
Our first thoughts surrounded the camera feature and we thought of all the different ways we could capture the learning that was taking place both in and outside of our classroom. Having had two iPad minis in our classroom for the 2013-14 year, courtesy of the Grade 8 class sharing with us, we knew that this was an area that most of us already felt pretty good at using. We then had a few friends wonder how we could post those pictures and share them with our family members. This is when we decided maybe we could use Twitter a little more and see how it worked.
WOW! Was this ever a good idea as it allowed us to talk about how to be safe on the internet, how to summarize our thoughts before we posted (because we only get to use 140 characters) and made us think about how often and what we should share.
Hopefully, this is just the beginning as we continue to search for information about things we are inquiring about, apps that will help us learn and ways to share what we have discovered with people who are important to us :)
