Imagine this with me.... You are in the middle of an amazing lesson and you decide to turn on your Apple TV to Airplay the most awesome student work you've ever laid your eyes on. You turn the projector on and it happens. A bunch of movie titles appear before you can get your iPad connected. From the back of the room you hear a student say "Are we watching a movie today?" or another student says "Suicide Squad! I love that movie." And then the discussion starts about which movie was best and who has seen what. Now, you spend the next few moments reigning them back in to the lesson. If you have an Apple TV in your room, this or something similar has probably happened to you at one point or another. There is a way to prevent this derailment from your amazing lesson plans. Let me introduce you to the Conference Room setting. The Conference Room Setting allows you to set a static picture to be displayed when you turn your Apple TV on. Yay! No more distracting and/or inappropriate movies to disrupt your class. When you turn on the Conference Room Setting, you select the picture you want displayed and then restart the Apple TV. When the Apple TV turns back on, you will see the picture you selected along with information about how to connect to your specific Apple TV. For specific directions on setting this up for your Apple TV, watch the video below.
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I am very excited to share this idea from our 4th Grade teacher Mrs. Melissa Vannoy. She has allowed me to write about this lesson on my blog but she is the brains behind this awesomeness! In 4th grade, students must compare the phsyical properties of rocks. Mrs. Vannoy started this learning goal with a fun rock cycle activity she found on Pinterest involving Starburst candy. Using a little heat and pressure, the students transformed their candy squares into metamorphic, igneous, and sedimentary rocks. The learning didn't stop there. Throughout this rock cycle process, students used their iPads to document the steps with pictures. Later, Mrs. Vannoy asked them to create an Adobe Spark video to share what they learned about the Rock Cycle. Here were her guidelines: As you can see, she gave them the very basic components of the presentation and let the kids go from there. Together with their partner, each student created an Adobe Spark video complete with images of their starburst rocks and explanations of what they did to create each rock. Once the video was done, each group played it for Mrs. Vannoy giving her time to check the accuracy of their explanations and the quality of their work. Once Mrs. Vannoy approved the videos, each group created a QR code that linked to their video. Yes, the students created these. It was not another thing for the teacher to do. They simply copied the link to their Adobe Spark Video and pasted it into the QR code generator, qrstuff.com. Once their QR code was created, they imported it into Pages and added a title. Wow! That seems like a lot of steps right? It always does when it is all typed out. The knowledge gained from this activity was worth every second spent on it. Not only did they learn some cool techy tools but the bigger picture is that they processed their rock creating starburst activity. It was no longer just a fun thing they did in science class but something they had to think through. They had to process the what, the why, and the how of the rock cycle. I am pretty sure each one of these kids can probably tell you exactly how each type of rock is formed now! Check out their finished products by clicking on each image below.*Note that when you click on each video the Adobe Voice website says was produced by me. I can assure you, I did not create these. To have an Adobe ID, the students must be 13. Our 4th graders are not. So, they all login to the same account using an email address setup under my name. This also helps the teachers when they go to grade because they can login to that same account and access each Adobe Voice Project. This is one of my favorites. I love how the students took it upon themselves to create a video book complete with chapters! |
This blog is a collaborative effort between the Technology Coaches at the Palmyra R-I School District and the Knox County R-I School District. We are passionate about integrating technology into the classroom and hope we can inspire others to engage their students with technology.
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