Photo Gift idea for Parents of my Students

An idea came to me for creating a gift for parents of my students. I wanted the gift to fit with the tech theme we have going on, in my BYOD, 1:1 iPad, 4th & 5th grade combo classroom.

I had students email me photos of themselves, in black-and-white. Then students made iMovie trailers with content all about themselves: what they like at school and outside of school, what they are thankful for, what they look forward to at the holidays. The student-made iMovie trailers were then saved on their iPads (iMovie Theater), and students reinserted the saved trailers into a new iMovie project, creating a voice-over on their trailers.

The final trailers were emailed to me. I saved them on my camera roll. I inserted the movies, individually, in a new iMovie project, and saved each one on YouTube under "unlisted". Then with the links to the movies, I created QR codes. The QR codes were saved on the camera roll as photos.

The student black-and-white photo and matching QR code for the individual student iMovie trailer, were placed together using the piccollage app. The pictures were printed, using my printer in my classroom, on photo paper. The 5 x 7 photos were each placed in a picture frame.

I tested if the QR codes worked, using my iPhone to scan the QR codes inserted in the student photos. The codes worked!

The end products were amazing!

Programming (Hour of Code)

My students went to the computer lab this week, and for the first time tried Hour of Code. 

We all tried to program the moves that the angry bird would make to get to the piggy in a maze.

It was thought provoking and fun for the students.

Then students showed me, later in the week, about computer programming for Minecraft through Khanacademy. 

Parents are asking me about good programming software to purchase at home for their children who are very interested in the activity. For now my answer is those two programs. I'm sure I'll have more discoveries just around the corner, but for now Hour of Code and Khanacademy are pretty good sites to explore!