Wallwisher and Student Voice

In our classrooms we are always looking for ways to have student share and hear ideas with peers. The traditional models are "turn and talk" or "share at your group" but I have found even though this allows for student voice, this does not allow for me to be in every conversation or for students on opposite ends of the room to hear from each other.

In science, we are constantly thinking and sharing ideas about investigations, observations of images, etc. as we build understanding to new concepts. I always want to be able to have every voice be heard and every idea to be shared, but we don't have the time or the space often to do this in the physical classroom.

Solution: Wallwisher. Wallwisher is a great website that allows you to build a virtual cork board and have students write a virtual post-it note with ideas. The site allows for walls to be embedded so its a simple click to my homepage for students. The wall also does not require a user name or password to add a post it note. One of my biggest time issues with students on sites is creating, remembering and using user names and log ins. Wallwisher solves that.

Here is an example of the board I will be using next week for my students to share ideas about how earthquakes occur. I simply embedded it in my site and students can double tap on the ipad to create a post it. Simply add in their name and share the idea!





This will allow for me to go back and see exactly who is participating (I always wonder what some of my students are actually talking about...) and what ideas each person shared. But more important than me being able to view it, it allows all the ideas in the classroom to be "heard" and students can see even what someone on the other side of the room is sharing without having to be a turn and talk partner.

Class Flipsnack of Lab Reports

I blogged before about using Flipsnack to create digital books of student work to share student work. One of my goals with technology is to allow students to see and share their work with each other easily. Flipsnack is helping with sharing! I have created a digital book of the students' lab reports from a class water cycle investigation. I put the digital book as an embedded file on my homepage so students can individually locate it on my class website and see each others hypothesis, data collection and conclusion!

Check it out, this is three page preview or click here to the full "book!"

More Movie Trailers!

More movie trailers! Enjoy. Excited to share at our film festival scheduled for Friday.

The Spooky Grasslands from Autumn Laidler on Vimeo.

Biome Movie Trailers

Here are the students iMovie trailers. They used the planning documents to build the content before starting to film. Some finished, so did most of the video. More to come. There are a few more groups I need to upload. We are planning to host a "Film Fest" with the trailers, green screen movies and movie posters! Should be fun....

The Rainforest from Autumn Laidler on Vimeo.

The Rainforest from Autumn Laidler on Vimeo.

Critical thinking and Film Making

After an uninspired start to my school year the last month has been full of new ideas and exploration with my students and technology. I decided to create a green screen filming studio for my students to make movies about the biomes they had just finished studying. I will share those soon! The work they did was creating scripts, creating the background for their speaking parts and then filming in front of the green screen.

I did not want to just stop at the movie making, but I wanted the students to be reflective both about the work and have practice at giving feedback that is both complimentary and critical. I wanted them to push their own work and see how they could help their classmates be better too.

I really appreciate the focus they displayed in watching each other's videos, but also the focus they put into the feedback. I have stated in this blog before that feedback is something I consider a weakness in my teaching practice. I want it to be done, be done in a timely way and be meaningful to my students. This experience allows me to remember that feedback can be meaningful and have an impact from a peer.

Here is a sample of the students viewing the work and giving feedback on Edmodo.

Reviewing Biome Movies from Autumn Laidler on Vimeo.

Videos and movie trailers to follow!

Using Flipsnack for Virtual Books

After working with my students using applications like Mental Note to create multimedia science journals I wanted to venture into using the student work to create an e-portfolio for individual student's work using the website Flipsnack. Flipsnack.com allows for any document that is a PDF to be transfer onto the site and combined into a virtual book with selected backgrounds. Each book can be downloaded, emailed, embedded, tweeted or posted to Facebook. I really appreciate all the ways to share the work!

Because almost any iPad app that has email capabilities then has the possibility to be turned into a PDF using the print function, it makes almost anything Flipsnack-able. The flipsnack books are also special because they do not require flash, so even as they are created with a bit of a work around from iPad to computer, they are easily viewed on iPads.

For easy viewing, embed these books to your homepage for your students to view. I also decided to take one project and put all the student work into a project book. This allows for students to see how others attempted and worked on the same project, which could lend well to student getting and giving feedback.

Here are a few key features to making a Flipsnack book:

On the Flipsnack.com site you can easily upload PDF files from both URLs or from files you have saved, even from places like dropbox!



This next section allows you to personalize the book background. I also checked the "merge all documents into one" to have a bit more flow to the book.



Check out my two Flipsnack books I made using some student samples. I really think a cool project would be a class comic book using Kabaam.

Animal Adaptations and iPads

My fourth grade students have been studying animals and adaptations. As a way to apply what they have learned about the why and the ways animals adapt they created new animals with adaptations to survive. The students had to select an environment and then decide on an adaptation that would help them survive in the conditions of the environment, help the animal eat, or prevent the animal from being eaten. Students worked on paper first and then chose either Audioboo and recorded a podcast and added the picture, or worked on Educreations. A few surprises: two partners recording the podcast together! Collaboration with the audio after they collaborated on their animal. Other students used the web search on Educreations to show how the animal they created was a mashup of animals already in existence. I tend to be resistant of students just searching for pictures, but the student example below proved she was capable,she was intentional and curated her photos properly to add to her message about her animal's adaptations!

I am very proud of their work! See the examples below.

listen to ‘Two headed turtah’ on Audioboo

listen to ‘Wolf Kai by jaylan’ on Audioboo

listen to ‘Greatness of princess the eagle’ on Audioboo

Educreations and photo sort

Implementing ipads in the intermediate science classroom has been a great adventure.  I am working on using the ipads daily, but also trying to use them in creative and transformative ways.  Although not something transformative, I think this is a good use of the technology.  My students are working on determining vertebrate groups and classifying.   I decided to create different dropbox folders with different pictures for students to use in a sort and then make a rule about their sort.  I put pictures in the group that were of two different vertebrate groups. We started with "rule" and "not the rule" for example, "gills" and "no gills" as the sorts went on, students were trying to find characteristics of vertebrate groups.

Students went to the Educreations application and started a new project.  Under the photo icon students can select Dropbox.  I have my ipads all connected to the class Dropbox account.  Students followed the folders until they reached the sort folder I directed them to open.  I labeled the sorts with generic numbers to not give any information about the characteristics of the animals in the sort. I put from ten to fifteen pictures in each folder.

Students then selected each image and resized it to fit on the page.  Once they have all the images downloaded students were free to examine the photos and find a common characteristic to create two groups.  We would do multiple sorts and students would use the apple tv to share their sort and characteristic.  Often they would create a rule around color, where the animals live, what they may eat, if they are large or not, but eventually a student would find the desired group, or I would create either the rule and ask them to sort or share a sort and ask the students to find my rule. 

Once students figured out the group and the label, we then tried to find characteristics that were true for each group.  Some of these were obvious like all fish live underwater, but others were pointed out and then observed by students, like all reptiles have scales.  Having the students be able to view some of the observable traits using pictures made the learning easier for students and gave multiple examples of a feature.

For some of my more advanced students I would have them use the web search feature to find another animal that falls into the group.  Another idea that my thought partner, Jennie Magiera, added to bring up the level of thinking, was to have students narrate their metacognition about how they are sorting and what they are thinking about as they grouped pictures.

Mystery Skype

Students were able to mystery skype with another science classroom in Huron, Ohio.  The students did well at their task, speaking, locating the class and using social media to connect with students in another classroom.  This was the first mystery skype we have done this year and it was successful for the following reasons:

• Using Langwitches Blog for great assessment and planning information
• Assigning jobs to students: questioners, answerers, greeter, partners: edmodo and map teams
• Practicing with questions that would be given in the "real" skype
• Practicing finding mystery locations with our questions

Silvia Tolisano's website host great ideas for digital learning, but her Skype resources were really helpful for me to execute a plan for my students and make sure the call was meaningful to our digital learning.  After we assigned jobs, read over the class questions, it was time to practice!  This step was really helpful for the students to practice both answering questions, using the questions, and working with a partner to narrow down the location of the classroom.  Two teachers skyped in from down the hall and created a "mystery" location for the students to work on.  The students teamed up as partners, one person had the skitch app open to the U.S. map and used the annotation tool to cross of states that were not the mystery location based on the questions and answers.  We also practiced answering the questions the class would ask us the following day.  (Sending the questions between teachers before hand is extremely helpful!) The partners on edmodo were able to share what the team was doing on the class backchannel.  This teamwork allowed students to work together and also share ideas if another team was not on the right track via edmodo.

When we skyped with the class on the actual mystery skype, the plan and practice the day before paid off.  The students were able to work comfortably with the map and edmodo and also had practice at being "on screen" for the Skype call.  They were able to locate the state after all the questioned were asked and they felt successful in the task.  After the skype we used edmodo again to backchannel our learning and ideas.  These became the tweets we composed to share our mystery Skype with a larger audience.

We are looking forward to connecting with other classrooms around the country through Skype! 

Social Media in the Classroom

After three weeks with students we are getting into ipad apps and programs like Edmodo and kidblog.org.  Next week we will be going live with a Skype call with a class in another state to add another tool to our digital learning.  I have been discussing digital citizenship a lot with students and discussing the difference between social and academic language and what is expected when we are using tools that are generally viewed as purely "social" and talking about how they need to be "academic" when used at school with peers.

I have turned to teachers that have more experience and are sharing their tools to help make the experience successful for both teachers and learners.  Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano blog, known on twitter as @langwitches,  is a great tool for all things technology and social.  I am using her as a guide for my new dive into social media with students.  I believe one reason her students are so successful is because she creates expectations that are explicit for students and she can assess them appropriately.  Her tools to guide students also make me feel more confident about implementing social media.

My next attempt with social media will be to have students write tweets on an Edmodo backchannel, review them, then post on twitter. I also wanted to create a hashtag that would be tied to our classes blogs but also one I could tie to the school so teachers, staff, and maybe parents could follow and tweet back.  My hope is the hashtag will become something teachers at National Teachers Academy use when tweeting to share ideas among staff as well.  I believe we are all learning and need to model this for students as well.  I plan to use #ntalearns to tag our class tweets and professional tweets I want to share with my school learning community.

Follow our learning on twitter @ntastudents1 and look for our upcoming blog posts!

Learning Together

Last week, I had the opportunity to present at the Chicago Public Schools iPad Academy about how my students are using Mental Note as multimedia science journals to teachers using or hoping to use iPads in the classroom.  The developer was nice enough to offer the participants a free app code to use and try the application after I showed the ways my students were able to use the application in the science class and also my goals for the future use of the application.  I was happy to share how I was using the app and how it was changing the way my students were developing their science knowledge.   I was able to share my ideas and get ideas from teachers as we had an informal discussion about the app and possibilities.

Or, how could this just be better?

What I learned at the conference though goes beyond presenting and seeing presentations. I was reminded, that for me, the deepest learning and best idea generation happens in a social setting of conversation.  After the conference, I evaluated all of my avenues of learning: twitter, reading blogs, reading books, going to conferences and trainings and I realized that the learning is similar to our classrooms in the way that it is mostly a one-way street.  The information or ideas are presented by others in a variety of formats and I make a decision to learn from it or to ignore it, much of the same way our students make the choice in our classrooms to participate in the learning or not.  The most beneficial and most engaging learning I experienced was through conversation about a range of ideas with other teachers who pushed beyond the conventional and pushed the thinking of those in the room. Some of these teachers are the same people I am learning from online, yet it was so much richer because it wasn't my consumption of their ideas and learning, but a collaboration and a conversation.  


This has created a focus for me to attempt to create the same culture in my classroom for the next school year and have students build their knowledge together and in conversation.  As well as a push to use technology to not only create records of their ideas and learning but to use it as a platform to start conversations and to generate new ideas.

After leaving this great event and reflecting on all the great teachers and ideas, I was saddened that the conversation was over...for now. Yet we have the technology to change this for both ourselves and the students we serve.  I am excited to try to continue the conversation with some of Chicago's most amazing teachers and have our students join in!

Multimedia Science Journal

My students have used traditional science notebooks in class for most of the year to write lab reports and to keep track of concepts and notes from experiments.  I decided to try an interactive iPad app for the last unit of study.  Mental note is a note taking application that allows for graph paper or lined paper and also has features like sound recording and the ability to add photos.  I like using the app for students because I have shared devices between three students per device and it has a tagging feature so that students could tag their work and find it easily.  The mental note application as a science notebook allows features past a traditional notebook, although I would love to see that addition of video and also the ability to move pictures once placed in the document.  The students can easily email the mental note to me for feedback purposes and also add it to a Dropbox folder to share with other students.  I will present more in depth on my use of mental note at the Chicago Public Schools iPad Academy.

See the work below for the student lab about solar cell investigations:

Equalize Our Education!

My students have just wrapped up a unit on examining education and the story of equity. They first went back into the past of public education and created a timeline of major equity and equality events in education. They heard for the first time about how schools were set up at a local level, when the Freedmen's Bureau started black schools after slavery ended, when schools were integrated by the Supreme Court and then in the real world with the story of the Little Rock Nine, they moved into the 1970s and learned about Title XI and the Disabilities Act. This lead us into the more present day story of education. I wanted to make the context personal and also continue on our exploration of equity in education. Thanks to my amazing teaching partners our students have explore equity is a variety of formats and context.

The students examined the choices offered by their own school system, Chicago Public Schools. Many did not know the choices they had beyond attending a neighborhood high school, as they all attend a neighborhood elementary school. After determining the many choices and options, they then began to notice not only the difference in type and enrollment requirements but the drastic differences in graduation rates, attendance rates, test scores, demographics and special programs offered by the different schools. There were many comments around the exploration of schools from the amazing special programs from sports to the arts and rigorous advanced placement programs at some the best schools and the disappointment at the limited options offered at some neighborhood and smaller schools. The students worked with partners to create "school profiles" using a keynote slide, researching the statistics and adding a photo of the school.

More important than the technology and great slides they took a look for the first time what their choices and their futures as Chicago Public School students could and would be in a few short years. We had a very revealing conversation about what aspects they "wanted" in a high school, what would be equitable in a high school and many of them came to the realization that only a handful of the high schools in our city offer those to students, and even more worrisome those were the schools that were the most selective and hardest to gain entry into. It seems my students came a conclusion that finding the right school for what they want did not always mean they were able to attend it. Which begs the question of our unit, is this system equitable? Is this providing a fair and free education to all?

One thing I do know is by providing my students access to the information and having them examine it critically I think they see the importance of equity and how far we still need to go to have a better version of it in our local school system. They realize that some of the inequity starts with access to the pertinent information to make an informed decision. They have realized the true impact of education both formal and informal when it comes to their own lives. I am so proud of their work, see it here!


We have a QR map created to share with our community:

Keynotes and Feedback

My students have been hard at work over the last few weeks on a big project around the Harlem Renaissance. One area I have been trying to grow in as a teacher is to have student voices and input in both the work they do, the expected quality, and now into the realm of feedback once the work is underway. So often as teachers we want to give meaningful feedback to all of our students on each piece of work, and for me with over 90 students this can be a daunting task. I also wonder if it's being read and how its being used if I already have given the almighty grade in the book. So I decided to approach this task of giving students feedback by including them in the process.

Another positive aspect technology has given is easier sharing of student work. Often seeing other peoples' work allows us to grow in our own work and imagination. I decided to bring both sharing and feedback to students in my classes as they prepare to share their work with others in the school later in the week.

We began the conversation with what is feedback, what type of feedback is helpful, and what should a person do when they get feedback? We came up with some shared language for feedback so it was phrased respectfully and then we hit the ground running. I was so proud of the feedback that they gave to each other as it was both respectful and constructive. It was some of the exact feedback I would have given to students, and yet some of it was something I had not considered or thought of to give. We also talked about how the person could chose or ignore feedback as he or she saw fit. The student may want to make the changes to capitalization, but may like the way the slide looks without a picture even though someone may have suggested to add one to the slide.

The student getting the feedback now had over ten comments from peers to consider when taking a second look at their presentation, not only feedback but a digital record to go back and re-read after present. It also pushed the rest of the class into the evaluation stage of thinking, all while having access to work of a peer to get ideas to take back to their own presentation, again with a digital record to reference.

A few takeaways from this activity for me are that in days when engagement can a challenge, I had most of my class engaged at a critical thinking stage, I had students sharing ideas, getting feedback on work, and ideas were being shared and saved through the use of ipads.

Here are some samples of the work.

Keynote Feedback from Autumn Laidler on Vimeo.

Investigation with Imagination

As a science teacher of students are new to a full hour of science each day I  have many obstacles, but I have many advantages as well.   My students' experiences up to this point is reading about science, some small investigations, but this is the first year for many that it is daily and investigation based.  The background knowledge they bring to the classroom is limited, but they bring excitement, wonder and interest each day to the science classroom.  In the season of testing, I am faced with preparing my fourth grade students to test on four years of science content, and I am trying to explore the content they may have missed, or have only read about in the past three years.


I have been working with physical science the last two weeks and on Friday after simulations, discussions and video I was ready to let my students apply their understanding of energy by building a roller coaster out of pipe insulation for the track and a marble as the car.  This is a widely used investigation in the science classroom and I was excited to see the students complete the work.  Many of my students have not experienced a roller coaster or a theme park, yet they approached this task with interest.  The students built the roller coasters with success and could identify the potential and kinetic energy throughout the process.  But I saw more than content being experienced.


As a faithful twitter reader I see many posts about learning, imagination, failure, cooperation, creativity and creating a love of learning in our students.  I witnessed these elements during this time in my classroom.  I know why people are afraid of all of these things: they are chaotic, messy, loud and time consuming.  But they are amazing and exhilarating and worth the mess and noise. It seemed fitting that roller coasters was the theme of the day.


The work of my students during this investigation reminded me of a David Jakes tweeted, "Right now, does education need ideas and imagination more than it needs action?" The roller coaster building started with students deciding what their teams would look like, and what their designs would look like for the roller coaster.  The students had to include a big hill, a small hill and a tunnel.  The rest was up to the team.  The teams designed using a creation app, then built the design the team agreed on, took a picture and then began to test.  What happened next was students failing, but being motivated and working together to adjust the design together to find a solution.  They were engaged and working, and the idea of failure does not seem like a proper label, although the design at first was a failure.  The learning and teaching was done student to student.  The students used the process of test, redesign, test, and celebrated a completed trip on the track.  Multiple times in my classroom students cheered and celebrated together the work they accomplished.  


After the initial success of a track came the imagination, creativity and the challenging work that students created for themselves.  They asked if they could add more track length if they could try more loops, curves or hills.  They tried things I could never have "taught" them, they tried things they imagined or their group created in working as a team.  The final part of the day of building was sharing each others work with a gallery walk.  They were proud to show and explain their design and were celebrated by classmates for their work.  


If nothing else I had a handful of students say to me after the investigation, "I love science" and that desire to learn and explore the subject further is a win for a me as a teacher.  They did not want to quit or clean up or move on to their next class for the day.  The love of learning, exploring and creating is something school and testing time often extinguish in students.  If students can leave my class and want more science and the desire to learn I think I have succeed for that day to take steps towards fostering life long learning.






Roller Coaster Building from Autumn Laidler on Vimeo.

Involving Students in the Quality Conversation

After my last post I meet with some of my fellow ipad teachers Anita Orozco, Holly Mullenix-Stack,  and our ipad jedi, Bruce Ahlborn, and asked them to help me with my debate between quality and creativity.  Holly, as a music teacher, agreed that this conflict of creative freedom with quality standards is something she faces in the music classroom as well, but luckily they all had some ideas to help.  All three had great suggestions that included: having students help decide what is high quality work, creating "stages of quality" for students and then allowing them to review each others work to find examples of each stage and determine the quality of work.

After another PLC meeting we saw a video of a teacher in another context of learning allowing students to work in groups, view others work and give critical feedback and then have another opportunity to work again on the same topic.  I considered all of these inputs and determined that I wanted to have students do meaningful work that included choice of topic, medium and work groups.  We had been studying magnets, circuits and conductors and insulators over the last week so this was the subject I would attempt to have them create a quality product for with the purpose of teaching another student who was out sick about what they learned during class with investigations.

Our first stage was to determine the "stages of quality" for a creation product.  Here is what they determined:

Stage One: Topic is clear, the written and spoken piece is easy to read or hear.

Stage Two:  Topic is clear and has supporting information, the written and spoke work are scripted and clear in message. The presentation has two or more slides or scenes.

State Three:  Topic is clear with supporting information including a clear beginning, middle and end.  The script includes questions, answers and the thinking of the presenter.  The work has been reviewed and revised before shared and published.  The presentation has slides that are multimedia with a variety of pictures, drawings, text, labels, etc.

After this conversation I was very hopeful since the students came up with this criteria and I felt confident they could see how each stage was reached.  The next thing we worked on as a group is determining the objective and topic for the lesson and what was going to be taught.  The students came up with about three objectives for each topic that could be answered.  They also created a list of terms that would need to be explained, used and understood by the viewer for each topic.  Finally, they were able to decide if their work would be done with a partner, group or alone. At this point they went to work on a plan and then started creating!

One trend I can see in the work is they were more likely to speak about the topic as they went and not create a script.  Many took a few takes, but never worked from a written script.  Some still had misconceptions about magnet attract to metal and circuit conductors being iron.  They also often used simplistic language instead of the science vocabulary terms.  For example, discussing a circuit as being closed and working, many students said it was "on" or "off" instead of open and closed.  In the case of magnets the terms attract and repel were used in the investigation, but students would substitute, stick or push apart.

So where does the work leave me?  I think I am looking at this as stage one of the creation process myself.  I need to continue to allow them to work and improve their quality.  My next step is to give them a peer review form and examples of work from across my three classes and see what others are doing.  I am going to give time for them to review digital work (please take some time to view some of the student work) and critique it in a way that applies the standards they create and give feedback to another about what they enjoyed and what they suggest for improvements.  There is indeed some high quality work, some that needs work, but overall I think we are on our way to improving the quality of work.

I would love some ideas from those who took the time to read the post and viewed the work!

What is Quality?

I am struggling with the term "quality work" for my students. I am faced with a few problems in my definition of quality and my acceptance of student work that has mistakes or is not perfect. This question has come to me most recently when working with my students on blogging. As a blogger myself, I know that my post are not all perfect, although I try to put my best writing and work out, I know that it is not perfect and may at times have mistakes. That being said, I also write, edit, revise, reread all at once, while I teach students the stages of the writing process as a paper and pencil process in separate steps: brainstorm, draft, revise, edit and finally digitally publish. Which then leads me to this question: do I need to improve my process, or do I need to allow them a bit more freedom in their own? I had a student say to me last week that he did not need to brainstorm, draft, revise or edit because he has his post "memorized" to which I said he needed to follow the writing process as that was the expectation. Another problem I face is when I ask my students to do this process, they are still making errors with clarity of message, fully developing ideas, and then some mechanics of spelling, capitalization, punctuation. So here I am with students using the writing process and still hitting publish on the blog post with errors or writing in need of more work. I continue to teach the parts of the writing process, model, give samples to do the work of revising and editing, share exemplars, and on and on. But what about the writing they complete now? Do I publish with mistakes and approach it as writing is a process and this is all a part of this student's journey and as they write more this will improve? Do I go over each child's blog and help them make every correction and pick the work apart and with it the joy of blogging? I want to have an end goal in mind, I want to have a definition of quality blogging, but I don't want to create a culture where quality means perfect. I also do not want to make it acceptable to post work that is not quality due to rushing through, not making corrections, not putting effort into revising, etc. These students are "young" writers and many are entering a stage in their education until recently have not done a lot of writing, but they also know the steps to revise and edit and often are completing them with high quality.

How do I find this balance? Having students produce quality writing, but allowing students to have some breathing room and not expecting error-free perfection?

If you would like to see more of their writing or leave them a comment please read the class blog.

Giving Choice with Podcasts in iTunes

I have been trying to find resources to use with students that connect to science, but also allowing them some choice in what they are learning. This is the first year for a full time science class for many, so their curiosity is very diverse. I discovered that students can access itunes through their ipad and download podcasts to their device. To download a podcast the student do not have to log in or use a password. I have found two podcasts with a variety of content choices and are accessible to students at all levels through video and audio.

After they watch or listen to the podcast my plan is for them to summarize their learning and give a review for fellow students. I will post the reviews for others students to read on our class website. Stay tuned.


Two of the podcasts I have discovered so far are Science Friday and EcoGeeks, please leave others you know about in the comments that would be appropriate for upper elementary students.

Kabaam! Kids create with Comics

Most of my conversations about apps and ipads these days seem to be about having kids "create" not "consume" content when it comes to ipads and apps. I think students need a healthy balance of both, but students really shine when given a creation app and are asked to show how they have understood or processed content. My students have been working on biomes and recently transitions to cells and cell parts. Science is often taught as "content" but is filled with opportunities to apply, create, and investigate. I introduced this app today and then had students go straight to work. We talked about ideas of screenshots, drawing images and taking a picture, or using classmates as characters in the comic. By far the most popular was including classmates and even me in their comic. It was also a quick way to see if their were misconceptions. A few of the students wrote about cells as being "on" plants and animals. A few others were confused by the two images as plant or animal from the samples in class. As a science teacher another great feature of the ipad is the camera can take a photo through the microscope lens. I had head of this on twitter, and trying it was easy for students too. They liked being able to have an "image" from the microscope to use when creating!