Technology from SCS Elementary

I am looking forward to presenting with Mrs. Nesbitt in March at the MACUL conference about “Eight Great Elementary Learning Strategies using Keynote.” The goal of this session will be to share ways that Keynote can be used for learning that go beyond simply making a presentation. Here are a few simple examples of ways that our students have been using some of these Keynote strategies in our technology classes.

NARRATION

The ability to easily record audio is a valuable Keynote feature for the elementary classroom. It allows students to record themselves reading text or explaining ideas and solutions. Before Thanksgiving, I created a simple template where our second graders could share some things that they were thankful for. Students learned to use the iPad keyboard to type their ideas and then recorded themselves reading their stories. If time, some students used the Keynote shapes to illustrate their stories. Here are a few examples of this project.

ILLUSTRATION

We were blessed to receive a grant from MACUL to purchase Apple Pencils for our students to use with our iPads. Before Christmas, our third graders used them to draw an illustration of “My Best Gift.” It was interesting to view the different ways that students interpreted this idea prompt. We saved their drawings into the camera roll, then loaded them into iMovie and stretched the image out to play for 30 seconds. Then students inserted a green screen video clip of a package being unwrapped that I had created. The students thought it was pretty cool to see their picture being “unwrapped!” One class had time to add some music to the background of their movie. If we had had more time, I would have had students record audio explaining why this was their best gift. (If you didn’t want to use the green screen in iMovie, the recording could have easily be done right in Keynote.) Here are a few examples of their recordings.

ANNOTATION

Keynote is a perfect app to use when you want students to annotate text. Our fourth graders used a simple Keynote template that I made to create a “Book Snap” where they annotated a text from a story. They used a series of video tutorials that I created so they could independently guide themselves through the project. Students were asked to use different colors to show an important idea, a vocabulary word, and something they had a question about or were curious about. Then they used the Keynote shapes and emojis to help visualize the text. Here are a few examples of their Book Snaps.