Popplet Lite

One of the apps that our district pre-installed on our iPads is Popplet. The first time I looked at it I kind of thouht, "Meh... this is pretty boring".  But then I discovered that you could take pictures and put them into the popplets and my whole view shifted.

The kids loved it!  (pretty much any time they get to use the camera life is good).  The first time I had them work with Popplet, they used their base ten blocks to do a subtraction problem. They had to take a picture of each step along the way, and write in numbers to describe what they were doing..

Then we tried out Popplets during Reader's Workshop.  We've been studying text features, so I had the kids take a picture of different text features in the books they were reading, and tell how that text feature helped them understand what they were reading.  The kids' creations were actually a lot better than my examples!  And I've gotta say... I'm currently doing IRR's on non-fiction text, and they know their text features!

I'm currently trying to figure out a way to creatively use Popplet during Word Work.  So far I've had them type in their words, and sort them... but they weren't super excited by this, and it was more a "you have to type your words into Popplet before you can play Chicktionary" kind of thing - some of them wanted to just take pictures of the sorts they had already glued into their journal and just be done with it so they could move on to the fun games.  :)