Technology Integration in the Lower School

This year, I am thrilled to be working with Lower School teachers to integrate technology into the exciting work that faculty do with our students each day. The main focus for technology integration this year is to empower students to use a variety of creation tools that will allow them to create a toolbox of valuable resources. Throughout each girl’s time at Ellis, these tools will inspire students to express the knowledge and skills they have learned in creative and meaningful ways.
In the Lower School, much of the students’ work involves the use of iPads. There is an iPad cart located on both the first and second floors of the Lower School, and this year, for the first time, our grade 4 students are each enjoying the use of their own iPad in the classroom.

The use of iPad apps is opening up endless opportunities to learn in a way our students have not experienced before. Recently grade 1 students learned to use the stop motion App, Koma Koma. After learning about food chains in science, students worked in teams to illustrate a meadow and all of the animals that call this habitat home. Using Koma Koma, each team demonstrated their understanding of the transfer of energy through the food chain by creating a short video. These videos were then pulled into iMovie where they recorded their voices explaining how their meadow food chain worked.

Other programs that students will learn to use this year include Scratch Jr., Book Creator, and Explain Everything. Students will also learn to use Google Drive to create digital portfolios.

The iMac desktop computers in the Lower School computer Lab are used regularly to play educational games, practice typing, and to further develop problem-solving skills through the use of basic coding programs.

Grade 4 students use what they have learned about programing to create robotics projects out of common craft materials and the electronic components in the Hummingbird kit. Students use this technology to engineer kinetic creatures and later illustrate their favorite scenes from books they are reading in class.

Soon our grade 4 students will begin producing a weekly audio podcast to highlight some of the exciting things that are happening in the Lower School. Look for more information to come on how to view these podcasts.
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