Classroom Spotlight

iPad…iLearn!

 

Students at Park Avenue Elementary School recently became authors ---digital authors that is!  First gradereistrom1 rs in Mrs. Meghan Reistrom’s class had the opportunity to use an Apple iPad 2 to record and narrate their very own original story. Prior to beginning the lesson’s main activity, Mrs. Reistrom modeled how the students could access the electronic books stored on the iPad.  Students were instructed to open up The Cat in the Hat, as many of them were familiar with Dr.Seuss’ books.  As they flipped through the story, Mrs. Reistrom explained how they could click on various parts of the screen to have the story read out loud, have a difficult word pronounced, and interact with the illustrations. After a couple minutes of familiarizing themselves with this type of book format, Mrs. Reistrom asked the class if they were ready to write their own digital stories.

 

Using her iPad to model the appropriate actions, Mrs. Reistrom showed her students how to open the app called Story Wheel, explaining that they would be using it to record their very own story. The students followed along, watching intently, as Mrs. Reistrom demonstrated how to open the app, enter a first name, and spin the wheel of pictures.  She explained that this wheel of pictures would stop on a random illustration, and then each student had to think of a sentence pertaining to the picture. The class watched as Mrs. Reistrom thought of her sentence out loud,decided she was ready to continue, pushed the record button, and read her sentence out loud.  At this time,students had the chance to open the app and try it on their own.  It was clear that the class understood what they had to do and followed each of the steps previously explained by Mrs.Reistrom with ease.  The culminating activity was when students had an opportunity to share their stories out loud as the rest of the class listened.

iPads2 “Integrating iPads into our elementary classrooms is one of our District goals,” explained Supervisor of Instructional Technology Shauna Schubiger.  “As we progress further and further into the 21st century, we must begin to change the way in which we teach and engage our students.  The iPad makes this very easy to do!”  The Freehold Borough School District places a serious emphasis on technology.  Each school has a state of the art computer lab, laptop carts, and a number of desktop computers in each classroom. “Our newest initiatives are iPad carts that we are in the beginning stages of rolling out for teacher use,” stated Superintendent of Schools Liz O’Connell.  “School districts are rapidly adopting the use of this type of tablet computer, however we feel that we are ahead of the curve as we have close to 80 iPads ready to be put to innovative use in our classrooms,” added Superintendent O’Connell.