iTouches Have Arrived

Friday was teacher work day, and we spent it getting the new iTouches that we received ready to roll out on Monday. For now each classroom gets ten iTouches, but eventually we will build to have a 1:1 ratio. The prep school students (grades 6-8 - the grade levels I teach) will be filled up to a 1:1 first. Eventually, next year the older students will be assigned an iTouch that travels with them instead of having them assigned to classrooms. Students will be able to take them home as well. However, we will not be checking them out this year as we still need to figure out exactly what our procedures will be related to that. One of the huge areas that I am excited about for the touches is using them as a response system for data. I am also looking forward to the possibilities with content creation, including having some of my students create audio books as a service project for the younger grades. We are not quite there on understanding exactly how to do these pieces yet.

For now I am thinking about how I will use them for the last five weeks of school. There are some applications for Spanish that students will use once we are back to our last two Spanish weeks. In the meantime, I am planning on launching them by having student read on them during reading workshop. There is one App that has a dinosaur montage and students can zoom in to individual pictures and then read information about them. One of my 6th graders is fascinated by dinosaurs, so I am going to offer this to him first. Then, there are a couple of other Apps with information about notable people and another with history classics*. I also want to add a link for University of South Florida's Lit2Go to the home screen of each touch.

I have also been considering putting some of my classical music into iTunes. This year my class has been pretty lucky. Because my classroom was the only one completed at the start of the year, we spent the majority of the year with out many distractions during reading and writing workshop. Even though I thought the construction that started up in the winter was a distraction, I quickly realized that amazingly enough, it was still relatively low on the distraction scale in comparison to having another class in the building.

As there was a higher level of noise in the building I talked to the students about how we still had to be productive but that we could experiment a little with ways to help us remain productive. For example, students have been able to give feedback on whether they would like to have classical music playing in the background to block out some noise, or if they prefer to block out the other class on their own. Students have had differences in preference, so the iTouches could be an opportunity for students to make decisions for themselves.

I was just reading Ruth's post about noise level in writing workshop. I had originally been thinking about having the music on iTouches available for reading workshop, but she got me thinking about how it would also be a great option for writing workshop. There are so many possibilities. It will be amazing to see different ways I will be able to maximize the benefits of iTouch in the classroom.