November 19, 2015
I had a vision for the lesson I did today for quite a few weeks. I spent a decent amount of time preparing for it and was really looking forward to teaching it. We were learning about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. I was incorporating a ton of technology into this lesson (Chromebooks and iPads) and the lesson relied heavily on all of the technology cooperating. After explaining the instructions, and passing out all of the necessary materials the students began their president investigation.
The concept was that the students would be giving a 3-4 sentence speech in place of one of the 2 presidents mentioned above. They each received a speech template to fill in. Using Google Drive I had placed in each students' folder a Google Slides presentation about one of the Presidents. I created them to be on a 1st grade reading level and have all of the information they were looking to use in their speech. Each student was to fill out their own speech paper as they went through the presentation on their Chromebook. At the end of each presentation I provided step by step picture directions on what to do next with the iPads.
The concept was that they would record their speech using the Animate Me! app. This app brings a still picture to life by adding mouth movements and a voice.
The students loved doing this and we all enjoyed showing their recordings to other teachers.
If this lesson would have went just like I planned, it would have most likely been my favorite lesson yet. However, that did not happen. Technology was not first grade's friend today.
Half of the Chromebooks wouldn't connect to WiFi.
...I fixed this by having the students work in pairs.
All except two of the iPads were unable to do the record feature in the Animate Me! app.
....I fixed this by having the myself and my co-op each use man one of the working iPads and we split the class in half to do the recording.
Some of the photos I uploaded to the iPads ahead of time of the Presidents got deleted.
...Luckily I anticipated this one and showed the students where the backup photos were saved.
Lastly, the app was a trial and only allowed you to record yourself for 10 seconds. I didn't anticipate this when I was testing it out. Unfortunately this wasn't something I had an easy fix for and the students just had to record as much of their speech as they could in 10 seconds.
Even with all of the complications that came from the lesson the students still really had fun during the lesson and most importantly learned a lot! During the review they were able to answer any question I asked and they have had more questions for me that we got to explore and answer as a class.
Even though this lesson didn't go as planned it was a great learning opportunity.
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