Apps in the Class

The classroom that I am student teaching in has a range of abilities; the range of ability levels is what I feel would be comparable to most classes within the general Seattle area.  Recently, I have received an IPod Touch from the University of Washington Bothell to use with students to help differentiate instruction in the classroom.  I have personally owned an IPhone since their first generation, and I am very comfortable with the ability of functions that this form of technology contains.  I learned early all about the educational value that IPhones or IPod Touches contain from my son.  My son just turned four and is a complete wiz using all the applications this technology offers.  I began purchasing letter games and virtual story books when he was younger, and now he uses different phonics reading games as well as puzzles.  Therefore when I considered ways to use this piece of technology in the classroom, I thought of three particular ways that would be helpful in my 5^th grade class:

1.       Working with kids with special needs.  The Itouch contains a stop clock, some students with special needs are very particular to time and need timers to help them transition into the next activity.  The Itouch has a stopwatch feature that is very easy to use; the student could even start it themselves.  (This feature could also be used in whole class instruction when students are given a specific amount of time to individually or pair-share).

2.      Working with students whom need extensions.  For this example I am thinking about a student very strong in math, if he was to finish early he could use the Itouch to graph date tables from data he collected in class.  We are currently working with stem and leaf plots and it would neat to allow this student the ability to take that information further and input the data into the graphing calculator application, allowing him the ability to see the data being graphed in multiple ways. 

3.      Working with students whom need a little more practice with their math facts.  There are a few students whom need a little more practice with their basic facts.  So to help them move from the counting stage to the recall stage, practicing these problems would help.  There is an application called Math Drills that offers students extra practice with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.  The app offers a review section and a practice session.  The review section is really nice because it uses a number line to visually show how 3+5= 8!

As the needs of my students become more apparent to me, I know I will discover many more helpful ways to utilize the Itouch in the classroom.