Soil Activity in 4th Grade

Every other Thursday or so, I get to meet with my teachers after school and talk about upcoming activities, new ideas, successes/room for improvement, etc. About two weeks ago I showed my teachers 3 new apps that I had learned about at the TCEA conference we went to. The apps were, ChatterPix, ThingLink and Word Cloud. The goal of this session was for teachers to get their feet with how they work that way when we meet to plan, they will have more tools to choose from. When I met with my 4th Grade teacher to plan out for the upcoming week, she had told me that she wanted to use ThingLink with her upcoming activity. To enhance the lesson even more, she thought it would be a great idea if she used two apps (Pic Collage and Thinglink) to really drive home what was going to be taught.

The lesson that was going to be taught for the day had to do with soil. Students were given 4 types of soil on plates in which one of the group members had to take a picture of each one, and put it into Pic Collage along with labeling it. Once students were finished in Pic Collage, they had to import their image into ThingLink and list attributes of each type of soil. Once they were done, students would export it out into ThingLink. When students were done, the teacher showed each of their work on the screen so that students could see how others described their soil.

Major props to this teacher btw. At our post-conference, she told me that she wants to keep doing activities that are higher on the SAMR model! I'm so glad teachers are starting to use this term!