QR Codes and Popplet

My very techie kindergarten teacher always comes to me with the greatest ideas. She had been reading about QR codes and wanted to brainstorm a way to use it with their science unit on living and nonliving things. After a few brainstorming sessions, we decided to use QR Codes to link to pictures of living and nonliving things and the children would decide which category they belonged in. In preparation for the lesson, we used QRStuff to create QR codes for the pictures we would use. In a separate lesson, the students explored and discussed what makes something living or non-living.

During the lesson, the children went around to stations and scanned the QR Code at each station. They used the QRafter app to do the scanning. They chose to find either living or nonliving things. If the picture fit into the category they chose, they opened it and saved it to their photo gallery. The students went around to 6 or 7 stations and found as many items that worked in their category.

After finding their items, the children used Popplet to organize the images. They typed in the category they selected - "Living" or "Nonliving"-  and then added each of the pictures to a separate Popplet. At the end, they added their names to a Popplet and chose a background color.

It was a fun and simple activity to check for understanding of the characteristics of living and non-living things and a great way to kick off the science unit on living and non-living things.

Here We Go

After a few weeks of testing creation apps that I think would work with our early childhood kids, it is time to update the ipads and make sure they all have the apps on them, have the proper settings, and can connect to the internet and email. This is no small task as these iPads have never seemed to connect properly to the Internet. After several attempts and meetings with the Apple Help department, it is all figured out. Our kindergarten iPads now can access the internet and have a kindergarten email attached. I decided to go with one email for the entire team instead of each teacher using their own email so that there would not be a huge influx of emails coming into the iPads. I set up a SAS student email account and used gmail.




















I organized the apps by style, starting with the basic apps on page one, putting content apps on page two, then moving on to the student creation apps, and finally the teacher apps. It is important for our youngest children that we keep the apps organized so they can access them quickly.

Here are screenshots of each page.

Page 1 - Basics

Page 2 - Content Apps

Page 3 - More Content Apps (Starfall)

Page 4 - Creation Apps

Page 5 - More Creation Apps

Page 6 - Teacher Apps

This is our start up pages. I am sure this will change as we go! Now we are ready to start our first project!

Welcome

A couple of weeks back I attended the Learning 2.012 conference in Beijing and decided it was time for me to start a blog documenting my learning, my successes, my failures, and my ideas. This conference was a perfect example for me of "just in time training" as we recently purchased iPads for our early childhood program and I was at a loss as to what to do, how to sift through the tremendous amount of apps available, and how to start using this amazing tool with our youngest learners. For now, this blog will be about the journey I take as I research and learn about the best way to use this tool with our youngest learners. I will post my thoughts, the steps I take to get setup, the applications I try and my summary of different apps, my favorite apps, what I try in the classroom -- what works and what doesn't -- and any other ideas or processes that I think will help anyone else who is out there trying to make this work with their students and teachers.

Here we go!