Our first Apple Coaching Session

On November 14th through 16th, South Garland HS had the privilege of working with a great Apple Specialist, Nia Ujamaa. This was the first of four coaching sessions with Nia. The purpose of the sessions is to have Nia assist teachers in integrating technology into their instruction. 

On the first day of this session, Nia and I met with four educators (Tim Atwood, Shanika McGaughey, Isis Carrington,  and Cristina Perez) to plan a lesson for the following day that included student technology use into what had already been planned.

Mr. Atwood and Mrs. Carrington were both reviewing for tests they would be giving later that week. Nia and I showed them a quick formative assessment tool called GoFormative. GoFormative is a tool that allows teachers to get live feedback from students so they can intervene on the spot. GoFormative allows students to answer both multiple choice and open-ended questions. A feature that is really cool is the drawing feature where students can show their work and submit it to their teacher. 

Here is a link to the GoFormative site. Teachers log in through Google using our email addresses and email password. 

Ms. Perez was having students write thank you letters to teachers and other individuals that have helped them. Instead of students writing a letter, we decided to have students use Tellagami or ChatterPix to record their thank you letter, import it into a Pages document, and send it to their teachers. Tellagami allows the user to create a customization avatar which will present a message for them. Here is an example of a Tellagami video.

ChatterPix is an app that allows the user to make pictures talk. Here is a video explaining ChatterPix and another that is an example of a ChatterPix video.

Students then created a thank you letter using Pages and inserted the video they created to make the letter interactive.

Mrs. McGaughey was working with students on grammar, specifically with complete sentences and identifying nouns and verbs. Nia came up with the awesome idea of having students record a complete and and incomplete sentence using GarageBand. Students would then trade with a peer and the peer would have to identify which sentence was complete and which was incomplete. They would also have to identify the nouns and verbs and explain why the sentence was either complete or incomplete. This would be added to the audio file. The audio file could then be shared with the teacher using Google Classroom. 

GarageBand is a tool that allows the user to record and edit audio.