Asked to develop a technology-integrated lesson for 5th Math, I naturally leaned to using the iPad. However, the lesson is being developed as a district resource and not every campus has iPads or iPods. Thus, I created a hybrid lesson. Since the elementary math specialists already had a bank of word problems that they had used in a “Words to Symbols” matching activity, we only had to spruce up some of the text and make it applicable or relevant to the apps we planned on using.

Glogster Learning Station: 5th Math - Patterns, Relationships, & Algebraic Thinking

The resources:

1. Word Problem Videos: Each word problem was created with apps (e.g. Talking Pierre, Talking WeeMee, Talking Ben, and Puppet Pals). These videos were then emailed from my iPad and uploaded to Glogster EDU.
2. Recording Sheet: The recording sheet was created in Word and dropped into my public Dropbox folder which generates a unique URL which will allow anyone to access the document (as there is no feature to upload documents in the free version of Glogster EDU).
3. Glogster Learning Station: The Glogster Learning Station is great and visually appealing way to house all of your resources for students to access during the learning activity. Within the learning station, I included teacher’s notes, student directions, the word problem videos (and text translation), and a screenshot of the recording sheet that hyperlinks to the actual sheet (available to download), and an extra activity (that could serve as an additional assessment).

While this is a teacher-created station, the idea is so simple that students could create their own learning centers or create resources for a classroom learning station (as featured by Ms. Carnazzo’s class). Her class worked in small groups to create content to teach facts about government.

Class Glogster Learning Station: 2nd Grade Government Facts

The beauty utilizing Glogster EDU as a learning station (see more Glogster Learning Station resources) is that it frees up the teacher from disseminating directions and materials and it frees up devices in the classroom. Many classrooms only have one iPad (or a handful) and a few computer stations accessible to their students. By using the hybrid model, students can visit the Glogster station and then use other tools to complete an extension or remediation (e.g. two or three groups of students are working at Glogster learning stations, one group may be creating their word problem video or Khan-esque explanation using an iDevice and/or Document camera, and another group could be using the SMART board notebook lesson (or laminated cards) to match word problems with equations). This is also a great idea for differentiated instruction.

How times have changed…I created the following learning station glog (“Don’t Underestimate Yourself”) for middle school mathematics less than two years ago and the video resources took me nearly all day to edit and prepare… on a PC. With the flux of mobile devices and the ease of media production on these devices, I was able to knock out the video resources for the equations glog in less than an hour (and that was only due to the fact that I am a bit of a perfectionist).

Glogster Learning Station: Secondary Geometry & Spatial Reasoning