Friday, November 1, 2013

First Grade Animal Facts

I just finished working with Mrs. Morgan's first grade class to help students share their learning about bats, owls and spiders. I spent some time during literacy centers working with small groups to introduce the iPad minis and the Doodle Buddy app.

Each student then drew an animal and saved the picture to the camera roll. 


Next, I used the totally awesome AirDrop feature to send all of the pictures from the six iPads to one. I was then able to upload the photos to the Shadow Puppet app where students then recorded one fact they knew about their chosen animal.

We ran into a few glitches with the Shadow Puppet app that I wanted to share. We had created a "cover" for our fact book but because no one recorded anything on that "slide," it was deleted from the Shadow Puppet.

A second issue is obvious when viewing the movie below. You can hear all the students voices but something happened when I uploaded it to YouTube. It seems to get "stuck" on certain pictures. The voices are still there and recorded but it doesn't move to the next slide. When viewing the project within the Shadow Puppet app, there doesn't seem to be any problem at all. Here's the first published piece where you can see/hear the issue:



Here is the Puppet again simply embedded from the Shadow Puppet site with the HTML code.



Even with the issues, I would highly recommend Doodle Buddy, AirDrop and Shadow Puppet as a means of creating, sharing and publishing student work! I would probably do less pictures and recordings or separate a project out into pieces so it's not so long. Overall, it was a super easy project and I'm sure we'll be using these tools again soon!