Guess Who Were The Big Buddies Today?

Today we were the big buddies for grade two students. Since we are the expert bloggers we were showing them how to log into kidblog, how to write a post, and how to publish a post. We were pretty proud being the big buddies even though we are only in grade one.

Turning Books into Movies

We have almost finished turning all of our special books into movies for our collaboration project with our really, really, big high school buddies.

Here are some of them. We have also put the ones we've been involved with on our individual blogs.

We Have Finished our Collaborative Books with Our High School Big Buddies

This week we finally finished making our collaborative books in Book Creator.  If you remember a while back (before Christmas in fact) we sent ideas of stories to our new friends at Fraser Heights Secondary. Ms. Lees students took our ideas and wrote stories for us based on our ideas.  Then they sent them back to us and for the past several weeks, when time has permitted and we were healthy enough to be at school, we have been working on illustrating the stories using the Draw and Tell app, and creating the books in Book Creator.

Not only did we draw the illustrations, but we also created the books, retyped the stories, and chose how they would look.  We were going to add voice to these stories too but decided instead to take screen shots and create little movies of us reading the stories.  Those are not finished yet but should be soon.

If you own an iOS device, and have Book Creator and DropBox on your device you can check out what we've created.  There are seven books in all, and they are all stored in this one dropbox folder.  All you have to do is download the file and open it in Book Creator. Hopefully you can open and read them and check out all of our hard work.  If you can't don't worry, once our movies are finished Ms. Lirenman will put them here on the blog so you'll be able to watch them instead.

We are excited to see where this collaborative project is heading.  After spring break we will be going on a field trip to the high school to meet these children that we've been working with.  In addition Ms. Oakland's drama class will be performing these stories to us.  This is all very exciting for us (and we think for the big kids too).  Stay tuned for more details.

Forces Passing Through Objects

Today in science we explored with magnets again. This time we tried to predict which objects our magnet would work through and which ones it wouldn't. We were quite surprised to see which objects magnetism CAN pass through. Have you ever tried this before?

Learning with Duck Duck Moose

Today we were very lucky because the makers of our favourite app Draw and Tell skyped into our classroom.  At first we had a lot of trouble though because we could hear them but they could not hear us.  We have this trouble a lot but today it was the worst it has been.  Ms. Lirenman had us blog about what was happening while she tried to fix the problem.  Thankfully the problem got fixed when she restarted her computer.  We were very patient.



 Once we got our technology working Duck Duck Moose shared with us how they create apps. We learned about how they first talk to kids, and ask them what they want. Then they brainstorm ideas. Next they have ilustrators who draw the images, and they use animators to make images move. They record special music too. They use a lot of engineers to design the apps and program the special codes. Once the apps are ready they let classrooms try them out before they go on sale in the App Store. They even said if we lived closer to them they would visit us and ask us to help try them out. They live in California, we live in British Columbia.



After we learned about how to make apps we asked them some of our wonder questions. We wondered about how they made the pretty pictures, and told them some of the pretty pictures we liked. We wondered if we could take a photo right inside Draw and Tell. We wondered if we could type in Draw and Tell. We had many other wonders. They listened to all of us and answered our wonders.





Next we got to show them some of the things we've been doing on our iPads using their Draw and Tell app. That was pretty fun for us too.



When it was all finished we grabbed our iPads and blogged about the experience. Here is some of what we learned today.   Angelo Eldon  Kaleb Nicky Zahra  Please check out all of our individual blogs.

We are are very thankful for this opportunity even if our technology did not work for a long time in the beginning.  Learning with others is the best way to learn!

Thank you Duck Duck Moose for spending some of your morning with us. We learned a lot from you.  :-) 

Using StoryBird

On the weekend Ms. Lirenman found out the StoryBird has changed their website and so now it works with iPads too! She was very excited and had to show us right away. Today during computer we played with StoryBird so that we could show our big buddies this afternoon how to use the website.

Here are a few pictures of us teaching our big buddies about this wonderful website.

Welcome To Our Classroom - This Is Where We Learn

Here is our video of our classroom.  It is a video of us and where we learn.