App Smashing!!!

Okay, Okay, Okay I have some BIG news. Especially for all of you teachers out there. There is a really cool new thing called App Smashing. Check it out!

I recently attended the TCEA conference the first week of February. I took the Math Academy (which I loved!) and the English Academy (not so much- actually very disappointed). One of the classes that I took was App Smashing. I LOVED it, and got to become pretty good friends with the lovely lady who taught the class. Here is her presentation all about app smashing. 

App Smashing is the art of taking multiple applications and smashing them together to create your final project. 

So after attending her class it got me all inspired to do big and great things with my class. **side note- I recently was told that I am soooooooooo far out here in incorporating technology while the rest of us are just here. Slow down and bring it back** I went back to my hotel room and started planning. 

Anyway fast forward. I went back to school and introduced app smashing. 

Some background information of what we have in our classroom: Each classroom kindergarden through third grade has five iPads per class. I hold the iPad cart for all of second and third grade. We have done this app smashing projects only using five iPads (one per table) but it worlds so much better if you can get your hands on 10 - 15. In the project I am about to show you we just so happened t have all thirty iPads. None of the second or third grade teachers were currently using them. I firmly believe when life gives you lemons. 

The two iPad applications I decided to use was:

Geoboard

Pic Collage

We recently were learning about congruent and similar figures. First I introduced Geoboard and how to use it. Within this application the students had to make two shapes that were congruent and two shapes that were similar. Here is what the application looks like while you are using it. 

After they created their shapes they were to take a screen shot of each. Now for the fun part. I introduced the application Pic Collage. They had to incorporate different aspects that I stated, like a title, their name, a background, and stickers if they wanted. They have so much fun with this application. We actually have used this a couple of different times!

 

So they took the application of Geoboard, their iPad camera, and Pic Collage, smashed them all together and created this lovely poster. What a great quick assessment tool! 

Before we did this app smashing project we did another where I had the students walk around the classroom and take pictures with the iPad camera. They had to take a picture of a pyramid, cylinder, cone, cube, rectangular prism, and sphere. Then they use the application Pic Collage to create a poster. Here was my example for the students. 

Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, concerns, how do you do's. I would love to hear from you!

Hope your spring breaks start off wonderful and fantastic. Stay tuned for our next App Smashing project: it had everybody absolutely impressed that second graders could do such a thing! (Well duh! Second Graders are super heroes.)