Lab School Challenge

Next week I'll be co-facilitating a cohort at Punahou Lab School.  We'll be working primarily with Early Ed teachers and will challenge them to gamify their curriculum.


In April, I was fortunate enough to attend the EdTech Teacher iPad Summit in Atlanta and attended a fabulous pre-conference session with Darren Kuropatwa on iPads in the Early years.  My absolute favorite activity from his session was the Learning on Your Feet, a mobile learning scavenger hunt which you can see here if you're on an iPad (it's an epub file). Luckily, Darren has licensed his workshops under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike Non-Commercial 3.0 License and so I've modified his activity to this challenge for our cohort (here's the link if the document below doesn't load):

So I'm super excited to create daily challenges and we're going to challenge our participants to become connected educators on day 2.  I'm going to start working on that now, which is a challenge for me because we're trying to keep it to 90 minutes or less, but I'm going to give it a try.

I haven't really been posting to this blog, but if you're reading this, I'd love to hear any iPad challenge ideas you have!  Tweet me @elliemellie or leave me a comment.  I'll be sure to share next weeks Lab School activities as well!

Look What I Learned Today with Doodle Buddy!

Today I went to the EdTech Teacher iPad Summit Preconference and it was awesome!  The presenter was Darren Kuropatwa who is absolutely phenomenal. You should follow him on twitter and if you have the opportunity to ever attend a conference he's presenting at, you should go to his session.  Super engaging and he gets you out of your seat, which makes me a happy camper. 

"There is not an app for good teaching" ~Darren Kuropatwa

One of the cool things he taught us how to do was create a self portrait using Doodle Buddy, a free doodle app.  The drawing above is my portrait and when I saw it, I was shocked at how much it really looked like me!  Even with no nose!  After you download doodle buddy from the App Store, here's what you do:

1.  Use your iPad camera to take a photo of yourself

2.  Open the doodle buddy app

3.  Click on the little tick-tac-toe looking icon and select Photos

4. Choose camera roll and select the photo you took in step 1

5. Tap the chalk icon and choose the color(s) you want to use for your portrait. I found sizing the chalk down helpful. I didn't use a stylus, but I bet that would be helpful too.

6. Start outlining your photo. You may think that there's no way it's going to look like you, but trust me!

7. Go back to the tic-tac-toe icon and this time, choose background and select the white background.

8. Amazing, right? Now just save to your camera roll by tapping on the wrench > save to photo album.

There are so many ways this can be used in the classroom.  I thought it could be used when talking about the elements of art.  The portraits could be used as student avatars when posting online.  Darren suggested using the portraits as screen savers on iPads, particularly shared iPads.  This would save time when trying to figure out who used the iPad last.

Do you have other ideas?  Please share!