End-of-Year iPad Projects, Amy Stipp, Librarian, Corkery Elementary School

The iPads were certainly great to have for EOY projects!  My favorite project we did was students writing thank you letters and/or poems to their teachers for all their hard work this year.  The students were familiar with using “Notegraphy,” “Haiku Deck,” “Phonto,” and “Word Mover” because they had used those apps for projects throughout the year. It was fun to do a culminating project of gratitude with those apps.  The students were given the option to use any of those familiar apps for their project.  They e-mailed their projects straight to their teacher.  What a delight for their teachers to open up e-mails of carefully designed and worded products from their students about what great teachers they were and how they had impacted their students!

One logistical change I have made with the iPads is instead of having students fill out their cards and place them together in a pocket beside the iPad charging station, they put the sign out card in the slot where the iPad belongs until they return it.  This method is much easier for me to see who has yet to sign out their iPad.  And it makes it easier for students when putting their card back in their iPad pocket.  They merely lift their card from their slot and place it back in their iPad pocket rather than shuffling through the stack of cards to find theirs.  

Colleen Herman was a golden nugget in my purse this month.  She helped me in so many ways.  She helped me get connected with configurator and helped me access my VPP.  She also suggested I use reflector, which allows me to project the image that is on the iPad for all students to see.  

In addition, Colleen connected me to Katherine Hlousek.  Katherine is a fellow librarian who teaches at Zapata, a neighboring school a stone'

s throw away from Corkery.  Katherine reached out to me and so generously came by after school one day this week and walked me through some lessons she has taught and showed me what has been helpful and not helpful to her library program.  She is on her game and her ideas are sharp and her enthusiasm contagious!  I look forward use what she showed me and learn more and grow in my iPad teaching skills.