A digital take on the traditional get to know me activity
Last year was the first time that I had access to my own iPads for the entire year. I had received 10 iPads via a grant the spring prior (making my 2018 classroom 3:1) and knew that I wanted students to get their hands on them right away. I didn’t want to waste any time, but it was the beginning of the year… with first graders…. what could I do to get them creating and using technology within the first few days of the school year?
PicCollage is one of my most favorite apps to use in the classroom. It is extremely versatile and user friendly, especially with their Pic Edu app (formerly Pic Kids). This app is perfect for back to school use! It is fun and engaging, but requires moderately low tech support from the teacher. So, I started going through my plethora of back to school activities, looking for ones that I could digitalize and I came up with your standard “get to know me” activity!
This version that I have created is pretty open ended and designed with young learners in mind. I purposefully left off a variety of categories for them to answer or fill in (like favorite color, age, favorite food etc. ) because that would have been a lot of extra reading (aka teacher support) in the first few days of 1st grade. I truly wanted this activity to be more about exploring and becoming more comfortable with the app.
After an introductory lesson on how to use the Pic Edu app I simply instructed students to find stickers or images of things that they liked (or that represented them). At this time I just had them save their finished product to the iPad library and I manually airdropped them to my own computer for printing/ sharing. Let me tell you- they came out GREAT! So great in fact that I decided to print them out and hang them outside our room for all to see. To save ink I simply changed my print settings to place 4 pictures on a page (I inserted the images as backgrounds in a Keynote presentation first… but that’s another story). Later when we got our Seesaw up and running I was also able to share these in each students account- everybody loved them 🙂
If this is something that you think you may want to try in your classroom (this would also be great to use with your staff!) you can grab your templates here!
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