Montlieu Project

            I had a very educational experience working at Montlieu this semester. I got to work with the iPad’s in a way I never worked with them before. I also got to work with two new apps that I hadn’t worked with before and they were very interesting to me and I found that when I teach I will definitely want to use those in my lessons.

            The girl I worked with during this time was named Jerney. She was a very sweet girl but also very shy. When I would ask her what her goals were, she would just keep shrugging her shoulders. Then when I asked her questions about what her goals were she would keep shaking her head. So I just decided to stay in the general area of goals like stay healthy, make good grades etc. She also didn’t seem very into doing the slideshow until the end when we could animate the pictures and words to go in and out with every slide presented.  Then we worked on another project that talked about our favorite hobbies and subjects in school. She actually enjoyed doing this more then what we were doing before with our goals. Overall, there were some positives and negatives with us using Keynote.

            Comic Life was a very cool app to use. When I first started using the app with Jerney I had realized she didn’t know how to spell most words. Every time she would make a new slide about something she would ask me how to spell a word. I think taking pictures for this project was a very smart move because it’s a very cool thing when children get to see themselves in a presentation. I think that’s what kept Jerney so interested in Comic Life. She would always ask me when we were going to take more pictures for the slideshow we would be making. She also loved the fact that in the app you could make your own shapes if you wanted to. One time I went to Montlieu and that’s all she wanted to do. I taught her how to make a star and she was really excited by it. I think aside from learning how to make shapes, this was an educational experience for the child because since she was so excited about taking pictures, it got her excited about writing too so she was really focused on writing the captains underneath the picture. I realized when we took pictures she also didn’t ask me to spell out as many words for her.

            When it was time for us to do our own activities with the children, I decided to download a free app called SightWords. It’s an app that it designed to teach the child to recognize common words by sight and sound. Since there would be a lot of people around in the library, I decided to only focus on her recognizing words by sight. There were different grade levels but I focused on hers, which was 2^nd grade. At first, we just started with the words but I realized she was really good at recognizing what the words were. She would only have difficulty with every other 7 or 8 words. So then I decided to have her read three words then make a sentence out of the three words. Then we would take a picture corresponding to that sentence we made. This was really fun to her. She had a great time and loved making up sentences and finding things to take pictures of. It was great because the last sentence we did was something about friends and we took a picture together and she really hugged me tight. It really showed me how just by spending this much time with a child you truly can create a friendship and she was able to break out of her shell and not be as shy.

            I think the experience had its ups and downs. I think that being able to work with the child on your own was difficult at first because there’s so many things you can do but once you find something they like its awesome because they get to have fun and learn at the same time. I also thought that Comic Life and Keynote were fun to work with but I feel like they were similar apps and similar projects to work out within the app.  If I could improve the experience in any way, I would let the children decide what to do with what apps but at the same time to make sure it was educational and not just letting them play games. I liked getting to know each other through the presentations through Comic Life but at the same time, that’s not always entertaining to the child.