PebbleGo & Plickers for Social Studies: Then & Now

PebbleGo Long Ago & Today Articles

February is a great time to visit our Social Studies standard, Then and Now. Lucky for me, my new favorite website PebbleGo has a terrific section of articles about Then and Now (or Long Ago and Today as they call it)  There is information on everything from clothes to transportation to school and games! For the last few weeks I have let the students independently explore all of the articles during their listen to reading time/computer time.

A few observations of the PebbleGo Long Ago and Today selection: 

• The students are obsessed with the old school telephone video! So much so that I have had to tell them they get to watch it 1 time a day only! 
• The students think it is hilarious to see what different clothes people wore
• I like that it isn't just information from the colonial days. Each section has information from colonial, frontier, 1900s, 1950s, and today. 
  
• As always great vocabulary and I really like how the pictures match the time periods. You'll find drawings, sepia, black & white and color photographs. Many students picked up on this and made connections to the books that we are reading about various time frames. LOVE that learning happening!

To summarize what my students learned I had them do a Now and Then sort that I found on Fantastic First Grade Froggies blog.   My students are big fans of sorting and I like how the images she included correspond to the subjects on PebbleGo. Head over to her blog if you want a copy-she has it for FREE! Thank you!

I was thinking of how I could add a fun technology component to this project to amp up our learning and make us more accountable. I have been speaking with my marvelous Media Specialist, Jenny, about using Plickers. (Plickers is a website/app that has premade cards that each student holds that you can scan with the Plickers app to get a quick answer to a question and see the results immediately) I thought what a great time to try it out and see how it works for Kindergarten! I found a variety of pictures of items from long ago and today and made them into a Google presentation. I did a split screen of the presentation and the online Plickers graph (see picture to the left) The students used their Plickers card to respond if it is an object used long ago or if it is from today. We could watch the graph on the screen to see how everyone was responding. I could also see their responses on the iPad that I was using to scan the cards. By using Plickers I can get immediate feedback on whether they are understanding the concept or not directly to my iPad. Don't you just LOVE using apps as formative assessments tools?! I am super thankful to my Media Specialist Jenny for all of her help! We did a lot of problem solving on the go and I will share my helpful tips about Plickers in an upcoming blog post ASAP! Check out my blog post about tips for using Plickers in K here!

Dynamic Dinosaur Reports using PebbleGo + colAR Mix App

I have a confession...I am a HUGE dinosaur fan! Ever since I was small I've always loved them. And much to my happiness my daughter does too (in fact this year for Halloween she wanted to be a princess dinosaur. Best. Idea. Ever!!) My students are always a big fan too so I try to make sure I incorporate them somehow even though they aren't apart of our science standards or reading curriculum. So I started using dinosaurs to help us learn about creative writing, habitats and research. For the last few weeks my class combined my aforementioned  LOVE of dinosaurs (did you know there is a new Jurassic Park movie coming out this summer?!?! SOOO excited!) and my love of PebbleGo PLUS some super cool AR (Augmented Reality) using the app colAR Mix. The end product was a lot of great learning with an amazing technology twist!

PebbleGo's Dinosaur Section

Dino Report Form

To start my students had all week to explore the dinosaur section of PebbleGo. They got to do what they do best investigate, learn and have fun! There are many reasons why I love using PebbleGo for research reports in early elementary, check out my previous blog post here to learn more!  Then on Friday during our guided reading groups we created our own personal dinosaur reports. I created a form (shown left) where the students would imagine what their dinosaur would be like, including what it eats, where it lives, what its babies are called and what makes it special. Of course we give our dinosaurs our own unique name: _____-a-saurus. (So my would be called Norman-a-saurus!) I asked the students to think about their research on PebbleGo and generate possible ideas for each area. They then drew and labeled their information. I didn't restrict any of their ideas, so of course we had a few dinosaurs that liked to eat cupcakes and live in a house. Creativity is fun isn't it?!?! Despite our silliness we still had some good vocabulary tied in with this report and the students were instantly engaged.

A finished report

After our reports I told the students that they were going to get the chance to create their own dinosaur and make it come to life right here in our classroom! Their eyes lit up with wonder and excitement! To do this I use the colAR Mix App. Find an app review for colAR Mix here. I went to their website http://colarapp.com/ and printed off their dinosaur sheet that is a part of the Dover pack. The only downside here is that there is just one dinosaur to choose from. I'm hoping someday colAR Mix will expand to others so that my students can have more choice.  During our writers workshop we worked independently to color our dinosaur however we wanted to, thinking about the research that we had done and our creative writing piece.  For instance, one student colored their dinosaur in all blues because she said its' habitat was the beach and that way it would be camouflaged. How great is that!

1: The dinosaur coloring page

3: The dino comes to life!

2: colAR Mix app reads the image

Projecting our dinosaurs on
the SmartBoard

Then we sat down and I opened up the colAR Mix app (you have to pay for the Dover pack in the app-it is not free for the dinosaur picture. The good news here is that you really only need 1 device to project it so you don't need multiple student devices or to buy it VPP unless you want each student to be able to access it later) and projected each student's dinosaur onto the screen. While we were projecting their dinosaur the student stood by the SmartBoard and read their report. Such a fun way to build our speaking and listening skills with a super cool technology twist! And because I'd want to touch a dinosaur if I could, I let each student then try to pet their dinosaur. They LOVED this part!

Trying to pet our dinosaurs!

Shows how AR works! How cool!

Overall, this continues to be one of my favorite activities in January and the engagement of my students is sky high! Remember, it is all about taking the super awesome technology that is out there and adding accountability and academics to make all of our students successful and excited about learning! I have put the writing forms I used below, feel free to use them if you want! Let me know if you do anything similiar or have any questions!

Pebble Go Polar Animal Reports Update!

We are finishing up with our  PebbleGo Polar Animal Research Reports and so far so good! A few reflections about the process:
*Students LOVED the exploration week. By giving them a lot of time to learn and investigate all of the animal reports on PebbleGo the students were taking in vocabulary, informational text and scientific information like I have never seen!!! And because of the great features like spoken text and short videos all of my students were engaged, including a my new to English speaking students and my Special Education students.  I highly recommend giving your students an extended period of time to research and look around on PebbleGo, I promise it will be worth it to see them be so excited to learn!
*The paper that I created for students to record their information seems to be working wonderfully! I did have a few students draw just the eyes of their animals in the first box (my fault, I put an eye clip art there as a visual for what it looks like. Some kiddos are just that literal). The small box keeps them on task and the 2 writing lines are about the right amount of writing space for where we are at academically right now. 

*Speaking of the writing piece, this has gone a lot more smoothly than I thought! What's cool is that when you press the speaker icon in the PebbleGo articles not only does it read to you but it highlights each individual word.  If you press the speaker button again it pauses and leaves the highlight box on that word. This proved to be worth it's weight in gold as my lower skilled students were able to just copy the word in the highlight box, allowing us to be able to read what the label to their picture was.  I'd have everyone listen to the entire paragraph for each tab, think of the key words, then listen again to the article and when they heard their key word press the speaker button to pause the highlight box on that word.  You have to be paying attention and press quickly, but it worked well! It was a good teaching moment to make sure the word we were writing had matching sounds as our key words. My higher skilled students would paraphrase what they read and sound spell it out or copy the tougher vocab words by using the highlighted box in the article.  I didn't have one student say "I can't do it!" or "Teacher how do you spell..." LOVING the independent factor here!

*For the cover page illustration we discussed as a whole group how to draw the animals as best as we can (reviewing shapes-bonus!) and what our rubric for drawing it would be. We discussed using proper colors (no polar bears are not pink) and how to make it fit in the space. Since I knew we would be using the pictures in Chatterkid I wanted the, to be large enough to make the mouth needed for the Chatterkid app. I then divided the students into their animal groups and put a Chromebook with each group with a large picture of their animal. I had thought to let them look for their own image but we were short on time and I chose animals that looked easier to draw.

Well that's it for now! Don't forget to check out my other posts on PebbleGo! Let me know if you are using it and if so, how!