iPads in the Early Years

January 8, 2015

Today over 500 educators in the Toronto District School Board came together today to examine how iPads can be used throughout the Grade 1 Comprehensive Literacy program to:

• find texts to support young readers and
• make thinking and learning visible through the use of technology to develop metacognition and assess student learning

I had the privilege of teaching this group of teachers how to use the app Explain Everything. To start, I used the app to create a short video on the basics of working with the app.

Then, we tried out a variety of tasks that were designed to inspire and spark some ideas for working with Explain Everything in the classroom with Grade 1 students.

Here are the tasks we tried:

• Making Predictions using Explain Everything
• Generating Questions using Explain Everything
• Exploring Point of View using Explain Everything
• Metacognitive Thinking using Explain Everything

We had a great day of learning! Ready to try out those iPads in the Grade 1 classroom.