Category Archives: Pictello

March 10, 2012 · 8:07 pm

Sharing Time!

Yesterday was the last day of Project iPad! To celebrate our journey we hosted an open house for our parents. We had a stellar turnout! Lots of parents and even grandparents came to see our project and we had a great time sharing our learning with them!

The children have worked hard on a Pictello book about the snowman they created with their families. The books are very cool but what really makes them special is that each child narrated their own stories. Listening to them read their stories themselves always brings a smile… I have managed to load all the stories onto the Pictello server. I will be emailing the corresponding codes as soon as possible. If you have an iPad and the Pictello app loaded on your ipad you will be able to download your child’s story and keep it! I have also downloaded a PDF file for each book that will be going out via email as soon as possible. Unfortunately the audio component is not part of this file. But you will still have all the pages for the book! It takes a little time to copy in all those email addresses so please be patient!

To begin our celebration we viewed a little movie that I was able to create on a neat product called PhotoStory3. This program lets you take the photographs that you have taken and put them all together into a slide show. You can add comments and put it all to music for a really cool finished product. I had used it before for our school mural project so this time I found it a little easier to put together. Not such a steep learning curve this time! The children loved seeing all their projects and it was fun listening to their reactions as they took a trip down memory lane! Apparently it is possible to email the photostory. I will have to try that!

Then the children shared their stories with their parents. I hope they enjoyed them as much as I did! Then the children taught their parents how to use the iPads. We gave the parents the snowman labelling project to attempt. They were great students!! Here are some of their attempts! I had so many neat snowmen that I will have to save some for future posts!

The children also got to share their favourite apps with their parents. It is difficult to decide which one would be their favourite. They certainly seemed to enjoy them all!

We also repeated our buddy picture project with the parents. The parents and students took a picture of themselves using the camera. Then they imported the picture into the Puzzlemaker app, created a puzzle using that image, and then proceeded to complete the puzzle.

The forty five minute long Open House time just flew by! I would like to thank the parents and extended families for coming! There were lots of adults so every child got to share their story with someone and no one felt left out! I know it is very difficult to come in the middle of the day to an event. Please know that it was greatly appreciated by both the students and myself!

After school I had to drop the iPads off so that they could move on to the next lucky school… What a great experience we had with them! I know that we will really miss them.

I am hoping to continue to explore the use of the iPad in the classroom albeit on a significantly smaller scale! We will continue to try to find ways to use it in the classroom and hopefully continue to share these efforts on our blog…. So please stay tuned!

Finishing Up

Today we worked on finishing up our books. We had some pages that needed to be tweaked! I have uploaded all the books to the Pictello server and made PDF copies of all the books that were created. After our Show and Tell Day I will email these to each family that would like a permanent record of their child’s work.

Our books have four pages in them. Each page represents a project. Each project explored different concepts and provided a variety of learning opportunities. The books themselves take only a minute or two to view but they represent hours of learning. I think that the children really liked creating their projects on the iPads and are eager to share their efforts. I am very, very, very proud of the work they did!! And the best part is that they had a really good time doing it! I bet they didn’t even realize that they were learning!

We are also sadly finishing up the time we have with this project. We have had the iPads for five weeks. I wish we could have them forever….. They are moving on to the next lucky group of students and teachers next week. We will have our final day with them next Friday. They have been an absolutely fabulous addition to our classroom and our learning. Boy, will we miss them!

Book Time!

Today we continued to put our books together! Luckily we had a lot of help! My daughter came in again to help with the recording. We also had a lovely surprise visit from Mrs. Beleznay who coordinates the iPad Project Success project! She offered to help too! So for about an hour, the three of us took each child one at a time to help them record their stories on the ipad in the Pictello app. We managed to get almost all of the projects completed! I am very grateful for all the help! The next big job will be uploading the books to the Pictello server so that we can save them and email them out to parents who wish to have a copy of this book in either Pictello book format or as a PDF file. We are hoping to share our books with parents on Friday, March 9th. They are not very long but they represent a wealth of learning. Learning how to create digital books, using different tools in a paint program, learning how to add text and text boxes are just a few of the strategies we have worked with over the last few weeks to make the pages for our books!

I have included some more of the samples of snowmen that families created as well as the snowmen labelling pictures the children did. I have to admit that I loved that project!

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February 27, 2012 · 8:42 pm

Putting together our Books!

Today we started putting together our Pictello books. I gave the children a quick demonstration on how to use the app to make a book. Then we worked through the outline I gave them. This is a big project for little people. Luckily we had a bit of help! Mrs. Turner, our class volunteer was here today and my daughter came in to help too! The children got started and with a few bumps and hiccups we got some of the books started. The children had to open the book file and on each page import a picture and then add some text in the appropriate boxes to go with each picture. They had to import the picture from the camera roll on the iPad which meant finding it on the camera roll and then selecting it to add to that page. Adding text is not easy either! Trying to figure out how to get those capitals and periods is a bit trying. The children continued on in the afternoon with help from each other. As you can see from the pictures they are very focussed on their jobs and helping each other. I had to do some editing, but by and large I am happy with the result. We will continue to work on the remaining books tomorrow and on Wednesday.

More Work on Pictello

Today we continued to work on our Snowman stories using the app Pictello. The children finished up their story frames about their snowmen and I used the camera in the iPad assigned to them to take a picture of their work. Then we will take the picture of their snowman, a picture of their work, and a recording of them reading their work to make their storybook. It is a bit labour intensive but the final product is well worth the effort. I am hoping to have some big buddies help us collate the pictures and recordings. The snowman project produced such wonderful snowman it is really nice to incorporate them into another setting and celebrate them!

We also spent some time working with the Math Bingo app. The children worked on the addition and subtraction segments. Lots of really good practise with their basic facts while having a lot of fun too!

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