Highlights from the Rootstown Second Graders: Writing with Google Slides & Buncee - Math Practice with Math Fight Fun - 2 Player Duel

The Rootstown second graders are beginning each morning in the AT&T Classroom with a reflective writing activity using Google Slides, a free Google productivity app for creating digital stories, presentations, reports, note cards, etc.  Features within the tool allow for slides to include text, images, hyperlinks and video. The Google Slides application offers a wide variety of themes, templates, backgrounds, and fonts that can be used to create very unique customized projects that are automatically saved within Google Drive and can easily be shared and/or downloaded. Each morning the second graders are creating a slide for a reflective writing assignment in which they draft a post regarding something that they learned the previous day. Providing written opportunities for students to reflect upon their learning helps to develop students as independent learners who take responsibility for setting their own learning goals and evaluating progress in reaching those goals.

Also this morning Mrs. Stackpole introduced the students to Buncee EDU,  a free multiplatform tool that students can use to create multimedia projects. The Buncee EDU platform offers an interactive digital canvas with thematic background templates for creating stories, books, cartoons/comics, presentations, pamphlets, posters, etc. Students are able to customize the templates by adding animations, pictures, text, drawings, and videos. The Buncee EDU platform also offers an extensive gallery of searchable media that students can add ti their projects and students also have the option to import external media from their computers or other websites. The second graders are using Buncee EDU to create animal cartoons to share the facts they learned from their science research.

During their math block, the second graders explored a new app for practicing their math facts.

Math Fight Fun - 2 Player Mathematics Duel is an educational math game that utilizes a split screen interface so that two players can challenge one another to solve math problems. In addition providing practice with math facts, the app also provides math speed training to improve concentration and reflexes for solving equations. The app is available at no cost in the iOS App Store and through Google Play.