App Smashing in 2nd Grade!

Mrs. Scheafer invited me into her class to help with a project, and it turned out so great, I wanted to share it with you all!  In Lead 21, her students are studying science in the community.  During this unit, they have been discussing where science can be discovered in the community, as well as where to find resources, such as pictures.  Students had access to their differentiated readers, as well as books from the library that are relevant to the topic.

When I came in, we created collages of science in the community using the free app Pic Collage (there is also a version called Pic Kids).  I showed the students how to use Pic Collage to take a photo of science from one of their books and add it to their collage.  I also showed them how to use the app Doodle Buddy to draw a relevant picture, save it to their camera, and upload to their Pic Collage. Students were asked to add at least three pictures (photos or drawings) and one piece of text explaining science in the community, as well as add their names.

Pic Collage is a fun app to use for this purpose, because students can easily add the photos or drawings, but they can also personalize their collages using fun fonts, backgrounds and colors.  This helped motivate and engage the students, and make each of their collages fun and unique.

When the students were finished creating their Pic Collages, they saved them to the camera rolls of their iPads and uploaded to their Seesaw digital journals using the "camera upload" option.  Mrs. Scheafer then pulled the kids to carpet whole group to review the collages on Seesaw, having each student present and describe what they chose to write about.

These really turned out awesome, and a lot of that is due to the rich background that Mrs. Scheafer provided her students.  When their foundational understanding of concepts is strong, technology can be used to enhance student learning by allowing them to create and share.