Unfamiliar Waters

Today I had the chance to team up with last year's "Teacher of the Year" to do a technology integrated lesson using Explain Everything with a custom made fraction strip along with a graphing-paper template as the background. This teacher had been eager to integrate technology somehow into her lessons, however I wanted to make sure that whatever was prepared was high impact, engaging and meaningful. I had walked by this teacher's classroom a few times before and noticed that they were using fraction manipulatives, so I thought this activity would be great! As I walked in, the kids immediately were like, "Yes! It's the iPad man!" It was great to see their overall excitement level increase just at the sight of the iPads.

As I got started, I explained how we had to download a file from Google Drive and so we had to log in each device as the teacher. This didn't take as long as I thought which was a huge plus! Once we were logged in I showed the students how the file worked. I showed them how to duplicate an image to help expedite the problem solving process. Ie: They had to make four copies of the 1/4th piece in order to make a whole. Once they were comfortable doing that, I turned it over to the teacher so that she could explain her lesson to the students. Basically the students had to create equivalent fractions from a fraction that was given on the board. They could either use the multiplication or division methods.

I have to give major props to this teacher for trying this! I know it was out of her comfort zone and she even admitted to the students that she was learning how to utilize technology in the classroom. Her students were awesome and were like, "We got ya!" How awesome is that?! To make this day even sweeter, when it was time to transition to go to another class, she had let her students know that it was time to put the iPads away. Immediately their response was, "Noooooo!" That melted my heart! I am glad these kids embrace a different way of doing something so routine! From the looks and sounds of it, I think I am going to be invited to come back to this class and do another lesson in a few weeks!