iPod Touches: Lino Online Stickies

Every morning in my classroom there is about fifteen minutes from the time my students can enter the classroom until the time they are considered late and classes actually begin.  To avoid complete chaos for these fifteen minutes I have my students respond to a journal prompt.  These responses are written in a composition notebook that serves as their "journal."  As you can imagine some of my students are very resistant to this activity, especially since I require them to write at least a paragraph.

Now that I have a class set of iPod Touches I have changed the way journals are done.  Each iPod has the Lino app installed.  This allows my students to use Lino It, to see the journal prompt and pin their response to the virtual bulletin board.  So far this has been a major success.  My students love to type their journals and the quality of their responses has risen dramatically, due in part to the fact that they know what they post can be seen and read by their classmates.  This also allows me to vary the type of prompt, for example I can post an image and have my students write a caption.

It is no longer Beta

The coolest part of doing the journals through Lino It happened on Friday morning when a substitute teacher was in for me.  I am a huge Syracuse Basketball fan and along with my wife, sister, brother-in-law and niece took two personal days and made the trip to see SU play in Boston last Thursday and Saturday.  On Friday morning, while waiting at Sullivan Square Station for the "T" to go into the city for some sightseeing, I was able to use my iPhone to pull up the Lino It bulletin board, see what my students had posted, and respond instantly to their journal entries from two hundred miles away.  VERY COOL STUFF!

iPods Have Arrived!

After about a months worth of planning and organizing my students finally got to use the iPod Touches this past week.  We started off simple and used them for some social studies projects that involve research.  Each student is creating a "bust" of a famous person from their state or country.  Not only do they need to create the bust using a hanger as a skeleton, but they also must write 2 paragraphs about the person as the person.

My Example Historical "Bust" of Ernie Davis

Now this is obviously something that could have been accomplished using the computer lab.  However, with the use of iPods I was able to have some kids working on the art part of the project while at the same time others did research and writing/typing.  This was literally the first day using the iPod Touches in the classroom and it went very well.

I will plan on using the iPods for much more, but I felt this was a good first step and a way to ease my students into their usage.  Once again I am amazed at how excited my students are to use technology to learn.  Even the educational apps (or "games" as they call them) are a hit!