When we looked at our results, we noticed that motivation was a factor. While some of our students were content using Draw and Tell and Explain Everything to document their learning, our struggling students seemed to find this a tedious task. Whether they were simply bored with the apps we were using, or annoyed by having to interrupt their play to record their thinking, we wondered: How could we motivate those students to communicate and share their thinking more willingly?
We decided to try some new apps to further engage and motivate our students. Apps that were open ended, easy to use and, most importantly, fun! In addition to trying new apps, we wanted to give those students a chance to be "experts" in the apps we used. Could these strategies help to motivate our struggling students? Would they help to increase their communication and thinking skills? Chatterpix by Duck Duck Moose is the first app we chose to start with. It is an easy to use app that is open-ended, lending itself to many different uses in our classrooms. Most importantly, the app is fun and engaging - exactly what we were looking for. This became our plan. We would introduce this app to the students we had identified as needing extra support. We would show them the mechanics of the app, and how to use the app to communicate their thinking. These students would then become our "expert" students. They would teach students in another class (or their peers) how to use the app. Through doing this, our "experts" would be communicating with their peers in an authentic way. Several questions came up as we were discussing this new plan:
Stay tuned to hear all about how this next step in our journey went.
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We are a group of Kindergarten educators in Ontario, Canada. Archives
May 2017
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