Take a Photo Walk With Your Students To Fire Up Their Writing

Have you ever been on an Apple Photo Walk? It's a free class offered at Apple stores where an Apple employee guides you through a scenic walk while providing tips and tricks for getting the best photos from your iPhone.

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My sons, Luke and Cody are super into photography and making videos, so they wanted to take the class.  As I took the class along with them - I realized a ton of possibilities for using this in the classroom! Here are a few of my ideas for using this practice for writing.

The Apple Creative met us in the store and gave us a quick run-down of how the photo walk would go.  

She really emphasized telling a story with your pictures.  This got me thinking of how this technique could be used to help your students write a story.

I decided my story for my photos would be this blog post with pictures of my boys telling their own stories.  

The boys had a harder time focusing on their own story as they were taking the pictures, but when they went back and looked through them, they were able to group pictures into themes and had several story ideas.

One of the suggestions she gave us was to find things that looked out of place - like these purple flowers with a burst of random orange color.

Another suggestion was to take pictures at different angles.  Cody was able to take a picture of this rock and make it look like a mountain!

I LOVE his dedication to this shot!  The boys were 100% engaged the whole hour and I know students will be as well when I try this out with my class!

The Photo Walk ended with an editing and share session inside the store.  The boys were able to talk about each picture with story ideas - this verbal story telling is great practice for students before they begin writing as well!

I will share how this activity goes with my class in a later post (as well as a few other ideas that were sparked during our Photo Walk for other subjects)! 

You can sign up for your own Photo Walk here.

They also have Teacher Tuesday classes with several different topics you can sign up for.

Stick Pick - An app that lets you differentiate as you call on students

I just discovered an amazing app for my iphone/ipad that I can't wait to use with my students when we get back from vacation.  It is called stick pick. When I first saw the app I thought it was a glorified stick container - you know the ones that you use to make sure you are fairly calling on your students.  It was cute, but I wasn't sure I wanted to spend my money on it. 

But... then I looked a whole lot closer and realized that it was way worth the $2.99! Not only does the app let you pick students randomly (or intentionally - see the little peek icon?), but you can set each student up with an appropriate level of questioning - instant differentiation. Questions can be based on Bloom’s Taxonomy, English as a second language skills, and a degree of difficulty can be chosen for each learner.

When you pick the student, a list of questions  is shown that are tied to the learner's individual ability level.  You can change the level at any time.

I also love that you can use it as a record of assessment.  When you click on the student's stick you can also record their answer using this rubric.

This is perfect for me because our school is focusing on Marzano scales, so it shows my principal during my evaluations what I am doing to measure student learning.

The app also keeps track of a student's progress overtime.

I can't wait to use this with my students!
Do you have any ideas for using it? Have you used this app before?