Voice Memos: Making Life Easier

Quick post tonight. I wanted to share two ways I began to utilize voice memos in my class. These are super simple, but so far they have been really helpful. Any Kindergarten teacher will probably agree that we tend to have to repeat things a lot. Instructions, tying shoes, putting on band-aids, etc.. One question I noticed I would get a million (no exaggeration) times every morning was "What's for lunch?" Of course, the kiddos don't all walk in at the same time so I found myself repeating the menu over and over and over. Now, I love talking to my kiddos in the morning but I would much rather use my time to see how they are doing and simply chat as opposed to repeating food items like a robot. That brings me to the first way I now use voice memos on my iPad. Before the kiddos get to school, I record myself saying what lunch is that day and leave the app open next to our lunch count. Students know to come in and press the play button as opposed to asking me. They got quite the kick out of this the first few times, but now it has become a part of daily routine. Saving my voice, one play button at a time.

Another way I now use the voice memo app is during math centers. Most weeks one of my centers is "Math Journals" where students complete story problems. In the past, I would have a parent helper (if available) or myself read the number story out loud for the group. I would often have to repeat it numerous times for students to remember the different parts ("Wait Miss Dunn, was it two blue cubes and three red? Or three blue and two red?") Now, I record the number story before math groups begin and set it out for students to hit play on their own as many times as they need to remember the details. Wala!

Two simple, easy ways to use voice memos to make the life of a Kindergarten teacher just a tad bit easier. Less time repeating myself = more time for meaningful conversation and teaching. 

New Years Resolution + Some Tech Stuff

I have different categories of resolutions for myself this year, both for my personal life and for my career. Blogging, at least once a week, is a resolution I have for my career. I think my biggest fault when I started this blog was that I wanted to start BIG. I wanted this blog to immediately have lots of posts and freebies and followers...but I didn't really know how to make that happen. When I couldn't make it big right away, I decided to quit entirely (hence why my last post was in July). I used the excuse that I was "too busy to blog" when the reality was that I didn't know how to start and I didn't want to start unless it was perfect. What I learned is that 1. My blog will not look like those other amazing teacher blogs right away and 2. My blog will never look like those other amazing teacher blogs if I never write any posts. You have to start somewhere...am I right? Am I right?! Right...well that's that. So I'm going to start small.

I'd like to share something that I am doing in my classroom that I would have never guessed I would be doing with Kindergarteners if you had told me 2 or 3 years ago. Every day my Kindergarten students are blogging and tweeting! Kindergarteners using Twitter?! Absolutely! Our school is all about creating digital citizens and I think it's awesome! Anymore, social media is used as an outlet for people to brag, complain, share meaningless information (I just went to the store #groceries), etc. By tweeting and blogging in Kindergarten we are teaching students how to use social media to connect, collaborate, share, learn, create, respect, and enjoy engaging in meaningful conversation. 

What I love most about using Twitter and Kidblog is students love it! It creates an authentic audience. Each day (I'll admit we aren't great about remembering this every day) we have three "tweeters" who get to share something they have learned or done in class. We've had students tweet things like "I'm excited for math today" in which parents who follow our class have responded moments later, "I'm so proud of you! Keep up the hard work!" The smile on a 5 year olds face when I read their parent's response from home is PRICELESS. Other students have shared something they learned, such as "Yesterday we learned that the Navy protect us from the sea." (during Veteran's Day). It is so wonderful for students to be able to share these things with a wide audience (mainly parents and other classrooms around the world). 

Students pictures are put on those black squares via velcro. Students use dry-erase marker to write their "tweet" on the laminated white sentence strips next to their picture.  I then tweet it on one of our class iPads to our class twitter account (@kindergardunn). This way all students can see the tweets that students write in our classroom.

Kidblog is something else we use in class each and every day. Students are able to rotate to our classroom computers during our Daily 5 (which is actually more like Daily 7 in our class - we added iPads and Computers to the original 5) every day. Each week, students blog about different topics. As winter started, students blogged about hot chocolate or what they like to do in the snow. I use the bulletin board you can see in the picture to tack up the topic for the week and sometimes some words that will help them get started. Higher level students and/or students who are computer-savvy comment on other student's post and create posts of their own. We have also used our classroom iPads to create posts with pictures. For example, we once created story problems using math manipulatives, took a picture, and created a post showing the number story and a number sentence to go with it. See picture below. 

Student uses iPad to take a picture of his number story to add to his blog.

Kidblog and Twitter are just two ways we use technology in our class every day. If you are skeptical about starting this in your class, have questions, comments, or suggestions for me to become better please comment below! I know there are so many tech-savvy teachers out there using technology is such cool ways to enhance learning. Can't wait to learn more and keep growing each year. Thanks!

-Miss KindergarDunn