Too Much Fun with our Promethean Board!

We have an exciting new addition to our classroom!  Our Promethean board has been installed and is up and running!  Soooo exciting!

We would especially like to thank the people from Promethean who sponsored this wonderful prize!  The board was one of the prizes in the Mindshare Learning Digital Video Learning Challenge contest that we won in the spring!  It is an amazing prize and WE LOVE IT!  We have been using it non-stop!

We have been having a lot of fun learning to use our new Promethean Board and learning to read at the same time!   I have been learning how to use the board.  While learning about the board and all the neat things we are going to be able to do with it, I found this really neat set of pages called Cut Up Sentences on the Promethean Planet website.  It lets the children move words around the screen to make up sentences.

We have also used the Promethean Board to do our addition stories together.  I was able to create a copy of the assignment we were working on the board and then we filled in the equations together!  The students created the math stories on their work spaces using our skeleton and spider manipulatives and then we recorded the corresponding equations.

The children were very keen to have a turn writing the addition sentence on the big screen!

Lots of volunteers! 

We love using it to see everyone's posts on our classroom Twitter page.  We can all read each other's posts together.  Great reading practice! I have a Twitter feed on our classroom blog site and the children like to check to find their tweets.  

We loved using it during the Global Read Aloud to share some of the Peter Reynold's stories.  Ish is a favorite! 

We love using it to do our brain breaks!  Jingle Bells with the Just Dance Kids group is fun! 

We are very lucky because we can connect our iPad to the Promethean Board and display what we are creating for everyone to see.  Here we made a Popplet about Halloween.  I loaded some clipart about Halloween onto the camera roll of the iPad and the students created a Popplet and labelled the pictures.  

Can you imagine how much fun we are going to have with this board?  

Way too much fun! 

More Fun with Technology!

We had a lot of fun during the first few weeks of this school year!  We have had a lot of fun creating a book using the iPad based on a story we have been working on in one of our readers.

The story focuses on introducing the school in the story.  We decided to create our own book about our own school using the iPads. 

We had a great time travelling all around the school taking pictures of the important sites in the school according to the children! Then we imported the pictures into an app called Strip Designer. and added the text. 

Then we imported these pages into another app called Explain Everything to create our book.  Then we recorded our voices reading the text.  We saved our book to the camera roll and exported it to Youtube.  We hope you enjoy our efforts!

I have also been experimenting with Aurasma again this year.  This app allows us to attach files to a trigger image such as a picture.  When you view the picture within the Aurasma app it triggers the attached file to display.  You need to follow our class on the Aurasma app to see the Aura.

To see our auras, please follow the following steps.

1.Download the app Aurasma on your device.  It works on iPads, and iPhones.  I believe there is also an android version.   The app is free.   It will ask you if you want to register.  You do not need to register to see the auras.

2. Search for our channel and follow it.  Our site is

mrsantonsclass or mrsantonsgradeone

You can do this by choosing the magnifying glass icon at the bottom of the screen.  Type in either site name.  Our channel should come up!  (I have tried it on every device in my house and had my family try it so it should work!)   Then choose the Follow button. The text will change to Following.

(image from KPM Doodles)

You should then see a little snapshot of the picture above.

3. You can then trigger the aura by choosing the option at the bottom of your screen that has the four corners (the one in the middle).

Aim your device at the trigger image above on this screen on your computer and you will see the aura activate with a purple swirl.  The attached file should then display.   The attached file is the book that we created above.  It is pretty cool!  Now you have two ways of viewing the same book!.

We tried it out this morning in our classroom with my iPad and the pictures!  Lots of fun!

As we create other auras this year we will share them to this channel. Auras are great because you can share them! You can share the aura by choosing the share button.  You can share it via email or twitter.

I have also shared the book on our Twitter site.  Our twitter address is @mrsantonsclass.  We have a classroom blog at mrsantonsclass.com.  I have added the twitter feed to that site.  

This year we took part in the Global Read Aloud 2014.   We joined with a large group of teachers worldwide who are completing an author study of the Peter Reynolds stories.  

We managed to read all the books and our favorite new term is "ish".  We don't have  the ends anymore! We have "The Endish"! 

One of our moms volunteered to help us with our Twitter page.  We share our news on the twitter board as well as on our class Twitter page  The students love seeing their sharing come up on the screen! 

Having lots of fun with technology!  Definitely something to tweet about!