Tag Archives: puppet pals

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Crafting Opinion Writing with Puppet Pals in First Grade

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Almost every class in our school is doing some form of opinion writing at the moment.  Last week, 1st grade spent some time tinkering with the Puppet Pals app on the iPad to see how it worked.  We have also been reading books that feature some type of opinion such as The Sandwich Swap and Sylvia’s Spinach.

In class, the 1st graders have been writing an opinion piece, so they brought that piece of writing to the library to use the Puppet Pals app to record their script.  We started on the floor in front of the projector.  I projected an iPad and opened the puppet pal app.  I quickly went through the various screens and made sure everything still looked familiar to students from their tinkering sessions.

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Then, I showed the students a few extra steps they would need to do in order to save their video.  They would need to give their story a title and export the story to the camera roll on the iPad.  I also used this time to explain what my role for the day would be.  Since each class has about 20 students, twenty videos needed to be uploaded to Youtube and put into a playlist for the teacher to share in class and with families.  I really wanted this step to be done while the students were in the library, so I told the students that uploading videos was my only role during our work time.  The teacher was available to walk around and monitor and assist students who were recording, but more importantly, the whole class had expertise in Puppet Pals because of our tinkering and could help one another.  I encouraged them to ask one another for help if they got stuck so that I could focus on getting their videos uploaded.

During the work time, there was not a single student who came to ask me for help to use Puppet Pals.  There were certainly students who got stuck, but they relied on one another to figure things out.  I really saw the benefit of giving them time to tinker in the previous lesson.  They also were empowered to support one another rather than rely on an adult to help.

When they finished recording, they did their additional steps to export their videos and then formed a line in the middle of the library at my table.  I opened the video on the camera roll and selected to upload the video to Youtube.  I signed into my channel on each iPad.  The students helped me name the video and stayed until the video was uploaded.  Then, they went back to their work space and continued using Puppet Pals to tinker and try out a story of their own choice.

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Once all of the videos were uploaded, I selected them all in my account and added them to a playlist.

We worked for a full 45 minutes to record, upload, and continue tinkering.  There was little to no behavior problems.  Every student who had an opinion writing finished was able to film and upload a video.

Now the classes are thinking about a next step for Puppet Pals.  The students are very curious about creating a story with the characters in Puppet Pals, so I have a feeling that we will be crafting some narrative stories very soon.

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The Power of Tinkering Before Assigning a Project

Educreations Day 2 (2)One of my library goals this year is to give students, teachers, and families opportunities to dream, tinker, create, and share.  That has meant many things during the course of this year, but one of the things that so many of our teachers are embracing with me is intentionally planning time for students to tinker with a new tool before we ask them to create a project with it.

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During collaborative meetings and virtual planning with teachers, I often ask if we can build in time for students to explore a technology tool with no limits, rules, or assignments.  The only assignment is to push as many buttons as you can and see what you can figure out about that tool.  In addition, there is an expectation that students will pass on their expertise to others as they figure something out through tinkering.

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There have been several instances of this type of tinkering happening this year.  Ms. Hocking gave her Kindergarten students time to tinker with storykit.  All of third grade tinkered with Puppet Pals before a folktale project.

This week, first grade is also taking time to tinker with the Puppet Pals app as they prepare for an opinion writing assignment in English Language Arts.

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Finally, 2nd grade is about to start creating math screencast tutorials using the Educreations app for iPad.

As I’ve facilitated these tinkering sessions, I’ve started to adjust how the sessions run.  We start on the floor to talk about tinkering.  Students share some knowledge about what they already know about tinkering.  Some of the responses I’ve heard are:  a time to explore, a time to be busy, and figuring things out.  I follow this with my own understanding of tinkering.  I establish two big ground rules: 1. Push every button you see in an app and see what it does.  2. Share what you learn.

In most classes, I breeze through the app with very little explanation of what I’m doing just so that students get a quick preview of what they will be looking at and what they might end up with.  In Educreations, I wrote 2+2=____ and then drew out a picture of how I solved that math problem.  I didn’t talk about clicking on colors, the microphone, or really anything.  I just wanted them to get a quick view of the end result.

Then, students had a large chunk of time to explore on the iPads.  For 2nd grade, we did this in pairs, but some classes have been individuals.  My role was to walk around and observe.  A few students were tempted to ask me how to do something, but I responded with a “give it a try”.  Very rarely did I do something for a student.  The only time I intervened was when students needed help getting the app up and running or if the iPad had a technical problem.

As I observed, I would stop and ask students questions like “What did you figure out?” or “Why did you choose to do that in that way?” or “Now that you’ve seen how that works, would you do it a different way next time?”.  These were common questions that I used again and again and they certainly were not ones that I started with.  I was very tempted at first to just jump in and show students something, but I learned to step back and ask questions that allowed students to show what they know.

I saw students naturally leaning over and helping other students, but during my observations, I sometimes saw an opportunity for 2 students to partner and share their learning.  This was another role for me to serve as a connector between students.

The energy level was high, and there was some frustration.  However, I did not see any student give up, get completely off task, or leave without learning something about  how the app worked.

At the closing of each lesson, we gathered back on the floor.  I connected an iPad to the projector and had students come and demo their learning for the rest to see.  We tried to move as quickly as possible to share as many tips as we could.  A big observation for me during this time was how attentive students were.  I’ve never seen students watch a peer presenter with such focus.  Usually, they are having side conversations or tuning out to think about other things.  This time they were watching, listening, and giving connection signals if they had also figured out that part of the app.  If time allowed, I had students turn to one another on the carpet and share even more that they had discovered.  During the closing, I tried to connect what students had discovered with the actual project that we would be implementing next.  For example, a student did a demo of how you can erase while you are recording and I added that this might be a tool you would use while modeling subtraction in a video.

Now that this time of tinkering has happened, our next step is to do the work.  First grade will use Puppet Pals to create opinion puppet shows and 2nd grade will create math tutorials to share.  I’m eager to see how productive students are now that they have had time to get familiar with the app before a curriculum standard expectation was placed on them.  My want to continue to explore the power of tinkering and how it can support the work that we are trying to achieve with students.

 

 

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Writing Folktales with Puppet Pals

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A few weeks ago, I introduced the iPad app, Puppet Pals, to 3rd grade through a tinkering lesson connected with an author study.  After that lesson, the teachers and I started planning an extension of their folktale unit using this app.  Each class chose a folktale to read multiple version of such as Cinderella, Goldilocks, Three Little Pigs, etc.  Then, students wrote their own story using some of the elements that they had noticed in their study of folktales.  In art, students designed characters and settings for the stories that they wrote in writing time.

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Puppet Pals HD is a free app, but if you upgrade the app for $4.99, you have access to so many more features.  My favorite feature is the ability to take photographs of anything and turn it into a character or a setting for your story.  Students used their artwork from art to create the characters and settings in the app.  From there, students took their script and recorded their folktales.  Some students had multiple characters and settings, so it was nice that they could pause the recording to switch out settings or characters.

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Once the recordings were done, we exported them to the camera roll and uploaded them to Youtube.  The app does allow you to name each story, but it doesn’t transfer the name into the camera roll.  I wish we had done the Youtube upload as part of recording because I couldn’t tell which story belonged to which student.  For now, all of the stories are just called “Puppet Pals” in Youtube. We’ll go back later and add the student titles and names.

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Allen Say’s Kamishibai Man and Tinkering with Puppet Pals

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Third grade has been working on an Allen Say author study.  In class, they have read multiple books, compared and contrasted, and started identifying what marks a book as Allen Say’s work.  In the library, we also read a book by Allen Say to fold into this class conversation, but we used the library lesson for another purpose, too:  tinkering.

Our read aloud was Kamishibai Man, which tells the story of an old man who has retired from his work of traveling into the city to sell candy and tell stories.  A kamishibai uses a wooden box mounted on a bicycle to display beautiful paintings which inspire oral stories.  The stories are told in a series so that audience members want to come again and again.  At each storytelling session, the kamishibai man would sell homemade candies which was how he made his living.  During the story, we had great discussions about how technology has impacted our lives in positive and negative ways because in the story the kamishibai man has to quit his job because people would rather watch tv.

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Following the story, we practiced our own way of oral storytelling using puppet stages, characters, and backdrops in an iPad app called Puppet Pals.  This app allows you to select up to 8 characters and 5 scenes.  You can upload your own images for the characters and scenes or choose from the library of options.  Users can move their scenes and characters off stage when they are not in use.  With a record button, every movement and voice is recorded as long as it takes place in front of the backdrop.  Puppet Pals lets you record up to 2 minutes of audio which sets it apart from some other apps that only let you record for 30 seconds.

We did a quick demo on the board by having 2 students come up and make a quick story in the moment.  Then, students split into groups of 2 or 3 with an iPad and spread out throughout the library.  They quickly got to work figuring out how puppet pals worked.  Most groups made multiple stories because they would think about something else they wanted to try once they finished one story.  It was fun to step back and listen to all of the voices that students were creating for characters as well as how they were moving characters in and out of the set and making them larger and smaller on the screen.  The students were trying this app without fear of failure, and they were learning so much about how the app functioned.  Some of them even created some pretty decent videos in the short time that they had to tinker.

Our closing time was once of my favorite times.  I asked students to think for a moment about what they might want to do if they made a longer video and had a longer time to work on it.  They listed out several things that probably would have come from a teacher checklist or instructions, but the difference was that they came to the realization of why these checklist items were needed because of their tinkering.  It wasn’t just something the teacher or I was asking them to do.  Instead, the checklist served to improve their work and organize their product.  They named things like:

  • Write a script for the characters.
  • Include instructions about when to change the backdrop
  • Write notes about when to shrink or enlarge a character.
  • Pause the recording in order to switch out characters or scenes. Put this in the script too.
  • Practice before recording.
  • and much more.

Third grade is about to launch into a study of folktales.  I think Puppet Pals has great potential to be a part of this project, so I intentionally used this tool as part of our Allen Say project to have a purpose for tinkering but also to make sure that tinkering happened before we asked students to create a more polished product.  Now, I feel like the stage is set for all 3rd grade classes to create a folktale Puppet Pal project if they want to.  I want to think more about how tinkering opportunities can be built naturally into lessons prior to larger projects beginning.  This type of model takes knowledge of the upcoming curriculum and early conversations about the kinds of collaborative projects that will be taking place each quarter.  I love this new thinking that has potential for future planning with teachers and students.