Spanish Fables and iPads in the Lincoln Park High School Library by Lindsey Mangurten, Librarian

For my first collaborative lesson I am working with a Spanish Teacher, Mr Kutney, with his Spanish 2 Honors students. I approached Mr. Kutney to see if he would be willing to partner with the ipads on a digital story book creation with narration. The students are currently studying spanish fables so the lesson fit in very well with the curriculum. The students spent two days in classroom working in groups of 3 to create their story narrative. The class will be in the Library for two class periods to upload photos and record their narration into the story.

To prepare I tested several different free apps (Book Creator, Story Creator, and Show Me). I selected Story Creator as it allowed me to create multiple stories for free and provided an option to e-mail the story off of the app. Book Creator only allowed one book per device before requiring you to purchase the app.

I just met with the first class of three for day one of the assignment. The students were quick to advance the process. As it was a spanish class, a student figured out how to add an accent to the language but holding down the letter and selecting the accent for the individual letter. For the next class we are changing the language setting to spanish so the system will not auto correct the words.

The students did not like that they could only use one picture per page. To correct that situation we added a photo collage editor to some of the ipads so the students could merge photos into a collage. One of the ipads did not recognize the newly created photos. We were unable to determine why it wasn’t working but I troubleshooted by editing the collage and cropping it and the photo eventually showed up in the photo stream.

Finally, we had one more issue. Once in the story creator app the student was unable to get the photo album feature to open. We tried powering down, I tried reinstalling the app and it continued to load without opening the photos. I have no idea why this happened or how to fix it. For now, I am going to continue to play with the two faulty ipads and try to determine what the situation was.

Overall, the students enjoyed the assignment and were quick to learn a new trick and share with the group. I will be doing this lesson two more times today and plan on sharing what the first group discovered with the rest of the classes.