"So, We Are Using Two Apps to Complete This Project?"

This past Monday my Digital Team and I stayed after school to work on a few activities. When we were finished with them, I had a chance to pre-plan with my 5th Grade Math Teacher about doing something later on this week (today). Long story short, they had to show 4 different ways on how to solve a problem (Arrays, Fraction Strips, Skip Counting and Colored Counters.) Since it is close to Thanksgiving, she had them coloring a Turkey with these various methods as feathers. When I presented the idea of using Pic Collage and Explain Everything together, she was like "I love it! But, I still want to do my Turkey lesson!" I was more than willing to compromise! :)

Fast forward today, we rolled brand new iPads to the 5th grade class. So we had to go through all of the "do you want to allow explain everything access to photos? etc etc. Once I presented what we were going to do, one of the students was like, "Hey, Chavez, so we are going to use more than one app to do this project?" My response, was "Yeah! It's called app-mashing!"

So anyways, students would work the problem out on their turkey feather first and then show it to the teacher, who would then confirm if it was correct or not. Once it was correct, the students could then re-work it in Explain Everything. As they would finish solving the problems, they would then save them to the camera roll and then toggle over to Pic Collage where they would import that picture and label what method it was. Our method of getting work off of the iPad had typically been iCloud and Photo Stream, however things were not syncing, so my awesome Digital Learning Coach at a different campus suggested that we take a screenshot and then import it back over into Explain Everything and export it back into the T's Google Drive. It sounded like a lot of work, but I had 3 "fast finishers" who quickly became my iPad Experts who would help other students save to Google Drive! Controlled chaos, but the classroom was literally running itself by that time! All it all, I think the project went really well! The teacher was happy because she still had the chance to work with those who didnt grasp the math concept. I was more than happy because other students wanted to help students make their end product look great too!