Mrs. Anton's Class!

April 13, 2016 · 9:41 pm

Fun with Kid Blog

We have been using Kid Blog for a little while now. This is an educational site that allows children to have their very own blogs! Each student in our class has their very own blog on our class Kid Blog site.

Kid Blog is a educational website made especially for kids to have their own blog site in a safe environment.

Please go to the Student blog heading at the top of the home page to find the Student Blog page. Please read over the “rules” of the student blog site! Click on the link to go to our classroom site. At the site the student will need to log in and add the password. They know what it it is!

The children have been posting to their blogs each week. It is amazing to watch them navigate their way through the steps it takes to create their blog each week. There are quite a few steps to create their entries.

I love the new interface on the site. It is much easier to navigate! That being said, I am still impressed with how fearless the children are when it comes to trying new things in technology! To create their blog posts, the children have to figure out how to navigate through a variety of steps to get to the site and then follow the procedures to add their header image, a title, write their post, choose the audience that they want to see their post, and then choose to send it to me for approval! That’s a lot!

After the first few weeks, the children are now able to go to the lab, choose the entry from their journal that they would like to share and complete the post with only a little assistance! Some of the students are choosing to write their own entries on the spot! They loved choosing their own avatars too!

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Tagged as Kid Blog, Student Blogs

April 3, 2016 · 12:10 pm

Dinosaur Fun!

We have been working on creating stories on the iPad using two different apps. We are creating the pictures using an augmented reality app called Walking with Dinosaurs. It lets us put a 3D image of a dinosaur in a photo. It is amazing because it looks very real!

The children are using the Walking with Dinosaurs app using the Photo Booth option. They choose the dinosaur they would like to have in their story and then pose the dinosaur with something in the classroom. We have dinosaurs reading books, playing with Lego, playing with the toy dinosaurs, and hanging out! The children take the picture and save it to the camera roll. Then they open the My Story app and import the picture from the camera roll into their story.

We are almost finished our dinosaur stories. The children have been taking turns going to our “recording studio” to record themselves reading the pages of their books! We are almost ready to share! They will be posted on this blog very soon!

We have also worked on a dinosaur research project. We learned all about the Apatosaurus (also known as Brontosaurus). The children sorted the facts about Apatosaurus into four categories. After we read through all the facts the children decided which category was the best fit for the fact.

The children glued the facts onto the correct category sheet and we created our dinosaur reports!

Check them out to learn some cool facts about Apatosaurus!

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Filed under Augmented Reality, Dinosaurs, iPads, My Story, Walking with Dinosaurs

Tagged as Augmented Reality, ipads, My Story, Walking with Dinosaurs

March 2, 2016 · 9:32 pm

Fun with Penguins!

We have been having a great time learning about penguins! The children have been learning how to sort different facts about penguins into categories. They divided the facts into four different categories: What They Look Like, What They Eat, About the Babies, and Cool Facts.

We observed the penguins in real time on webcams located at the Vancouver Aquarium and SeaWorld, Orlando. It was fun to watch their antics. Some of them were very loud! One penguin likes to play peek-a-boo with the camera.

We added a QR code to our penguin reports that links to the Vancouver Aquarium penguin cam! We use our Scan app to scan the code and it takes us directly to the Penguin webcam!

It almost seems like magic!

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Filed under Augmented Reality, Penguins, QR codes

Tagged as Augmented Reality, ipads, Penguin Webcams, penguins

February 10, 2016 · 10:26 pm

Counting Book Fun!

This is one of the counting books that one of our students finished making today! The children have been using the My Story app to create simple counting books! This app is a very versatile app! The children can use a variety of mediums to create their books. For this project the children used the stamps within the app to create a simple count-up book! The children had to choose the image, learn how to copy it as many times as needed for each page, add the appropriate text, and then record their text for each page!

It sounds pretty simple but please remember that we are only in Grade One! That’s a lot of steps! Creating the book, adding pages, adding images, and then copying them as needed, adding text including the correct spelling and punctuation, and then finally recording them is really quite impressive! All by themselves!

When the children finished their stories, I had them record their sentences in our “recording booth”! It is a quieter spot to allow their voices to shine! We still get a bit of background noise but it is helpful noise!

I love this app because you can save the book as a movie, which lets me share it with you! I can upload the movie to our Youtube channel and then put the link to the movie on this page for you to view!

Here is another one!

They were so focused!

Hope you enjoy them viewing them as much as we enjoyed making them! Too much fun!

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Filed under iPads, My Story, Youtube

Tagged as ipads, My Story, Youtube

December 16, 2015 · 10:54 pm

Fun with the Hour of Code!

Last week we took part in the Hour of Code! The Hour of Code program was created several years ago to encourage students to explore coding. During the week of December 7 – 13th students around the world took part in this initiative. You can check out the Hour of Code here by clicking on the highlighted link! We were one of the 4655 sites that took part this year in Canada! You can look up our school on the Hour of Code map!

Our Big Buddy class came and helped the students log in and start learning to code using the special site created to encourage students to learn to code. This year the theme of the hour was Star Wars. The children learned how to use computer code to move the little robot around the screen to do a variety of tasks.

There are three different tutorials to do on the site! Each one has a different theme! You can code with Anna and Elsa from Frozen, do Star Wars and build a galaxy, or try the Minecraft hour of code. Each one is a lot of fun and introduces you to coding in a fun way! Check them out at the Hour of Code tutorial site.

First, we watched a bit of the tutorial about learning to use Blockly to move BB-8 character from Star Wars around the screen. Then the big buddies worked on the iPads and in the computer lab with the children to work through the tasks. The Big Buddies did a fantastic job helping their little buddies figure out how to make BB-8 move around the screen and do the different actions. It was so much fun to watch!

It was fun to use our Promethean Board to demonstrate how to do the tutorial!

This is a screen shot from the Hour of Code website with Mountain View School highlighted! Too much fun!

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Tagged as Hour of Code

November 8, 2015 · 9:47 pm

Fun with Pumpkins!

We have been having some fun with a cool augmented reality app called Quiver (used to be known as CoLAR). I downloaded the trigger image page which is a colouring page found on their website. I had the children colour the page and then used our smart board to share what happens when you hold an iPad with the app open over the trigger image of the pumpkins. The pumpkins get up and dance around! Too much fun!

You can find additional pictures on their website. You can download the trigger images and experiment! There are a variety of trigger images to choose from with ranging in subject area. Some of the images are free. Some of the images require you to download the images within the app for a small fee.

We hope you enjoyed the little booklet we made to help us practise our Halloween or Fall vocabulary using the words we are trying to practice! The children had fun making the funky covers!

We have also been practising our new sight vocabulary words using our word bank bags. The children cut out the words and then try to make up sentences using the words. You should have received a small ziplock bag with a Halloween or Fall sticker on it with a lot of small pieces of paper with words on them last week. I hope the children taught you how to play with them! I took a few pictures of some of the sentences the children have created using these words. The object of the exercise is to create as many sentences as you can! We have the children create sentences and then we go around the classroom and try to read each other’s sentences! Hopefully you have had some fun creating sentences at home. It is a great way to practise the Dolch words in context! Please take pictures of the sentences you create at home and with your permission I will post them on our blog! Just email the pictures to me!

Here are the first sentences emailed to me! Yeah!

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Filed under coLAR, Halloween, iPads

Tagged as Augmented Reality, CoLAR, Halloween, ipads, word banks

November 1, 2015 · 9:48 pm

Fun with Bat Facts!

We have had a great time during the last few weeks working on a variety of projects. One of them has been a mini-unit about bats. We watched a movie about the flying fox bat that I found on the National Geographic kids channel. We also read a few books about bats to find out about all the different kinds of bats. We made a little poem by filling in the blanks with our favourite bats. Then we made our bat covers!

I created a QR code to attach to the project! When the students scan the code using the iPads the video we watched about the flying foxes comes up. The urrl for the video is attached to the QR code. I use a QR code generator that I found online to attach the urrl to a code which is generated and I then print off!

The children have been asking me to add QR codes to everything now!

I couldn’t get a good picture of the QR code in action because it linked to the video too fast! Good WIFI!

We use an app called Scan to view the QR codes! If you have Scan or a QR code reader on your idevice you can view the video we watched too! Have fun!

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Filed under Augmented Reality, Bats, QR codes

Tagged as Augmented Reality, bats, QR Codes

October 18, 2015 · 6:42 pm

Fun At My School!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO2L1jhQ6r8?rel=0&showinfo=0]

Welcome to a new school year! I thought we would start off the year with an iPad project we have just completed!

This is a book we created on the iPad about our school. Just click on the play button to see and hear our book! We went around the school and took pictures with our iPad of the important places in our school.

We imported the pictures from the camera roll into a great story telling app called Explain Everything. We added text to the pictures and then the children volunteered to record some of the pages of the book. Some of the pages we did together.

We based our book on a story in one of the books we are learning to read in our classroom. I thought it might be more fun to make a book about our own school. It was fun to see which places the children thought were important to have in the book!

After we completed the recordings for each page we saved our book to the camera roll and uploaded it to Youtube! We hope you like it!

Please check back often or choose to follow our blog and receive reminders whenever we post! This blog will be like a sort of digital newsletter! We hope to share our projects and learning with you each week! Enjoy!

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Filed under Explain Everything, iPads, Youtube

June 18, 2015 · 9:46 pm

Open House Fun with Augmented Reality!

We had a great time getting ready to share our projects for our Open House evening. The children practiced using Aurasma to share their projects. We love using augmented reality apps to share our projects.

It was fun to see how excited they were opening their projects and taking a look at their friend’s projects too.

I loaded all the projects on our class channel so the students could view any of the auras we had created.

Each snowman triggers the corresponding video that we created using Chatterpix. You should be able to use the pictures on our Snowman project page to view all of the auras if you follow our channel.

Our channel is called mrsantonsclass. If you open the Aurasma app and search for our channel using the search option our channel should come up. If you follow our channel all of our cool auras should be accessible. You could also use the trigger images we created to view our iMovie trailers about Dinosaurs and Space that we created using the pictures we created using the Walking with Dinosaurs app, NASA Spacecraft 3D, and our new favorite go-to app – Green Screen by Do-ink. The trigger image is embedded on the creative writing pages. We linked the movie trailers to the projects using Aurasma! You should be able to view the movie trailers at home using the Aurasma app and the trigger image of the dinosaur or the spacecraft! Just remember to follow our channel!

We have talking dinosaur pictures and talking snowmen!

The children also got a chance to share their books that they have created.

Here are a few samples!

We used a lot of different apps to create our projects. Our favorite apps to create these books are My Story and Explain Everything.

We had a great turnout for our Open House evening! Thank you to everyone who made the special effort to come back to school in the evening to view our projects! It was greatly appreciated! Thanks to Isaak’s, Abrielle’s and Rayva’s Moms for helping me get the refreshments ready!