technology - Judy Imamudeen

10 Ways to Use ChatGPT as a PYP Curriculum Coordinator

By Judy Imamudeen | June 7, 2023 | Comments 0 Comment

Are you resisting Artificial Intelligence (AI), afraid it’s going to lead to the destruction of our humanity, eliminating our jobs and withering our brains? Stop that! No, really that kind of thinking stifles creativity and innovation, and if you are a pedagogical leader, then you have an obligation to embrace emerging technologies. We are guiding our programs to develop our learners to be leaders of tomorrow. We can’t cling to the past. And when I say the past, I’m not talking about 500 B.C.E., I’m talking about 5 months ago. In fact, the past is no longer bygone days of old. It is one hour ago. To keep up with the fast-paced world, we must be open to change and agile.

So, let’s face the facts, just like smartphones aren’t going away, AI isn’t either. I’m not suggesting that you should let AI usurp your intelligence, I’m telling you that can use it to augment it and give your creativity a boost. Our jobs as PYP Curriculum Coordinators are complex, and often times we work in near isolation, so we could use a little help from AI from time to time. Although I plan to dedicate part of my summer learning to tinkering on ChatGPT to figure out more uses, here are at least 10 ways that you might use it to brainstorm and elevate your program right now:

Use it to inspire ideas during planning meetings: From provocations to possible field trips to inspiring student action, if teachers are in a rut, then stoke their creativity with a few ideas from AI.
Write or re-write central ideas: Wordy or confusing central ideas can be banished easily. If you work in a candidate school or your POI needs enhancing, then put in the related concepts and the aspect of your transdisciplinary theme you want to cover. Don’t forget to put in “child-friendly language” into your request before you hit send.
Create newsletters or articles for your learning community: Does your marketing department ask you to create newsletters? Are they due tomorrow? Well, give yourself a helping hand with plugging in your ideas and let it design a first draft so you can improve upon it and make those deadlines.
Generate ideas for parent meeting topics and activities: Ever been stumped on planning a parent meeting, or coming up with novel ways to work with parents to address their concerns?
Rewrite communication to check for tone and bias: Written communication, particularly emails, sometimes can hurt or upset staff or families. This is especially true when we are stressed or the topic is emotionally charged. Better to have AI rewrite your email so that it is more sensitive to the culture and issues in your community.
Come up with ways to improve teacher instructional practice: Some teachers really could use help but you may not be sure how best to help support them. Whether you want to come up with behavior management techniques or approaches to lesson planning, ChatGPT can help you coach teachers.
Develop our Program Development Plans: Oh yes, that’s right, struggle with your action research no more! ChatGPT will help you come up with goals, timelines, and possible ways to collect evidence for your school to move forward with its growth.
Create solutions to scheduling problems: Time is the only thing I can’t get a refund on, so I want to use it wisely. Whether I’m trying to find creative ways to get collaborative planning time with homeroom and specialist teachers, or I’m trying to figure out better time-management techniques for myself, using ChatGPT to hack these problems seems like a good use.
Plan Professional Development Sessions: Sometimes I walk out of a week of team meetings and think to myself that I should do a PD. But I don’t always have the time to make good on this desire. Throw the idea into ChatGPT to cut down on the cognitive load of PD design to come up with fun and interesting ways to design professional learning. It doesn’t matter if it is a 15-minute PD or a 2-Day training, it will definitely save time and inspire you to find engaging ways to promote professional learning.
Cross-walk standards: There are so many aspects of the curriculum that we have to manage, and mapping out the expectations and objectives of one set of curriculum standards to another is time-consuming. You can input your standards and ask it to find commonalities to ensure that our programme of inquiry and classroom instruction is comprehensive. Imagine what you could do with all that time if you got a head-start with ChatGPT!!

Bonus idea: Make sense of data: AIs are pattern-finding machines! Use it to help you triangulate data and generate optimal assessment practices for your program’s learning goals.

I hope this sparks your imaginative use of ChatGPT, inspiring and supporting your pedagogical leadership. I bet if you copy and pasted my 10 ideas into ChatGPT, it could give 10 more ways that we could use it. Go ahead! And share that with me! I want to expand and excel in my role as a coordinator. Let’s grow together!

And before I hit publish on this post, I’d like to leave you with some ideas from ChatGPT about some considerations for improving our results when we use it; it told me:

1. Be clear and specific: When you ask a question, try to be clear and specific about what you want to know. This will help the ChatGPT algorithm provide you with a more accurate response.

2. Use natural language: ChatGPT is designed to understand natural language, so try to phrase your questions in a way that feels natural to you. Avoid using overly technical or complex language.

3. Be patient: ChatGPT is an AI system that requires a few seconds to process your question and generate a response. Be patient and wait for the system to provide an answer before asking again.

4. Provide feedback: If you feel that ChatGPT is not providing you with useful answers, provide feedback to help the algorithm learn and improve. You can do this by rating the responses or providing additional information.

5. Stay on topic: ChatGPT is designed to answer specific questions. Try to stay on topic and avoid asking unrelated or vague questions. This will help the ChatGPT algorithm provide you with more accurate and relevant responses.

(By the way, I actually wrote this blog post… But who knows next time? lol.)

Well now that you have some ideas and tips, the skies are the limit! Let’s go forward into this new era of AI together!

Judy Imamudeen

Developing learners as leaders is my joy! I am committed and passionate International Baccaluearate (IB) educator who loves cracking jokes, jumping on trampolines and reading books. When I’m not playing Minecraft with my daughter, I work on empowering others in order to create a future that works for everyone.

judyimamudeen.com

#EnhancedPYP: An Inquiry into the Hokey-Pokey

By Judy Imamudeen | November 26, 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Whenever you move to a new school, you inherit a space that once was someone else’s classroom or office. And as you begin to inhabit this space, you have to rummage through all the “old stuff” that once belonged to another. Some of the remanents of my predecessor were binders full of old Programmes of Inquiries and Unit of Inquiry planners. It was felt like the “PYP Through the Ages” as I combed through the documents.

One of the PYP planners had the title (remember when we used to have titles for our unit planners?): Let’s Do The Hokey-Pokey. I never thought the Hokey-Pokey was that deep. I just about peed my pants reading that. Oh, man, so glad we don’t do that anymore!!

But it’s not just that shift away from titles as topics that has got me thinking about the Primary Year’s Programme’s (PYP) evolution. What are the “trends” taking place in education in general, and what really needs to be “enhanced” in our schools?

Do we need flexible seating, as much as we need flexible thinking? How can we “enhance” that? what kids remember.png

I don’t think we need Slide Staircases in our hallways and trampolines in every classroom to inspire creativity. I think kids come naturally equipped with curiosity and imagination. Let’s not forget what is behind this trend–that our learners are unique and that there are optimal conditions for them to thrive. It’s about the kids, not the cushions. Let’s enhance our relationships as much as we enhance our school design.

Do we need better technology or the more skillful use of it? How do we enhance that? tech quotes

I don’t think we need to have virtual reality headsets and 3D printers to prepare our students for their tech-infused futures. Yes, we must replace outdated iPads that we can’t update anymore with new ones. We want tech that improves instruction, not impedes it. However, let’s remember what tech does for our learning–we can go further faster in our research skills and do some amazing innovative projects when tech gets involved. Nevertheless, the trend with more technology in our classrooms is about enhancing student-directed learning and represents democracy in learning. Let’s enhance the student’s voice, choice, and ownership.

What really needs a facelift? It’s educators and our approaches to learning.

I share these 2 examples because I see a lot of schools are making superficial changes in their schools. Or schools that are being built from the ground up with some fantastic designs. The enhancements are not about the fresh paint and fancy bells and whistles. It’s about a shift in our practice. I know that doesn’t look as sexy on marketing brochures but it’s the truth.

And what has started with deleting the word, Title, on our PYP Unit planners is now evolving into something much bigger, much grander than these “school makeovers”. What is truly changing is the US, as we widen this definition to increase agency.

Now put your right foot in….and shake it all about
do the hokey pokey
And Turn ourselves around
That’s what it’s all about

Judy Imamudeen

judyimamudeen.com

Click. Learn. Create.

By Judy Imamudeen | April 6, 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

I live in a world of curiosity, surrounded by buoyant imaginations and inquisitive minds. I forget what it’s like in the “real world”. But this past week my sister had her birthday and what I thought was a simple project of curating loving videos was an absolutely enlightening experience of how others perceive technology and use it. A continuum of fear, with arrogant ignorance at one level: “Don’t know, don’t care to know”-ness and vain helplessness at the other with “I don’t want to look stupid so I won’t try”-ness. I made how-to videos for making a video using Facebook Messenger (the very app we were communicating in!), and yet the willingness to do it wasn’t there. It was fascinating to bear witness to this. No one was willing to simply click on a button and give it a go.

Now you could say that this is a generational issue–“It’s those Baby Boomers!” Maybe…but I think it’s a mindset issue. It’s a lack of interest and desire to move beyond our comfort level. It’s a fear of failure. And all of us “Digital Immigrants” suffer from it.

I feel strongly that all of us, young or old, must embrace David Higginson’s motto: Click. Learn. Create. We have to be open to exploring different technologies and apps. Not because we have to be experts in everything, but we have to be more playful and less rigid in our beliefs about ourselves and what we can do. We need to get comfortable with making mistakes.

Personally, I like to challenge myself with technology, creating a podcast was just “for fun”. This website was created just “for fun”. I wanted to learn more about these things and researched and played around. For the past few months, I’ve been teaching myself about how to create online courses and all those things that are entailed in it. It’s been a journey of exploring all the learning management systems and the ways content can be created for it. I’m loving the challenge. But moving from a curiosity into creation seems like the longest journey ever. And it isn’t because of what’s possible with tech. It’s because of my mindset.

In my head, I hear of a litany of “What If” worst-case scenarios: What if it’s crap? What if I pick the wrong platform? What if I could design this better? ….etc….it’s all the same self-berating message that boils down to “I’m not good enough.” I think, this culturally programmed message of perfection paralyzes me at times, and I have to will myself to overcome my anxiety. But as awful as I feel sometimes, it is absolutely joyful when I encounter someone who has another piece of the puzzle and this gives me the courage to continue. I may move slowly, but I still move forward.

But this IS learning. Learning isn’t just about acquiring knowledge and skills. It’s about becoming a better version of ourselves. Me 2.0 It’s about surprising ourselves with what we can do. It’s about connecting and collaborating with others with purpose and passion. And most importantly, it’s about growing ourselves emotionally so we can be mature, sensitive and happy human beings. One of my friends, Graham Baines, would call this #SeriousFun.

Even the smallest efforts can lead to transformational gains in our personal and professional development. I wish for all of us to Click. Learn. Create. so that we may Discover. Inspire. Empower.

Judy Imamudeen

judyimamudeen.com

#IMMOOC: Why the Status Quo Makes Us Slow and Stupid

By Judy Imamudeen | March 17, 2018 | Comments 1 comment

My student stood agog: “Wow, you type so fast! How do you do that?” I looked down at my keyboard and then back at my student. Do I even bother to explain the QWERTY keyboard set up and how I learned to type to my 1st grader? I mean, will the keyboard even exist in the future? Will touch-typing even be a relevant skill?

It’s odd to think that the QWERTY keyboard is an excellent example of why we need to look at common things with uncommon sight. Why innovation is so vital in our educational systems. Have you ever heard of the Fable of the Keys? Do you know why we have that layout of letters of the home keys? Perhaps you think it was created to improve our speed and efficiency when typing? NO–quite the opposite. It was to slow us down so that those old fashion typewriter keys didn’t get jammed up. Its crazy to think that in an era of such technological impact, that such a simple feature of our computers cannot be revamped to improve our productivity. It’s a bit foolish really that we haven’t adopted another style of the keyboard when you think of it. And it makes me wonder what else we are doing in our world that is relies on 200-year-old technology.

Again, I wonder if the layout of the keyboard of our laptops and devices should be reconfigured to produce faster typing speeds? That’s the most sensible approach, right? ABSOLUTELY NOT! I think about this provocative quote about innovation: Anytime teachers think differently about (3)

And it makes sense, right? Why would we spend all that time and effort when we could be reimagining how we might capture thoughts and ideas? Most of us submit that talk to text will be the way of the future. But I wonder how often in education we just repackage these same sorts of “old” ideas which have gotten standardized into our systems. When you look at the quote by Seymour Papert, a man who brought technology to education, can you think of anything that you are using or doing in your classroom that just recapitulates antiquated practices?

The phrase “technology and education” usually means inventing new gadgets to teach the same old stuff in a thinly disguised version of the same old way. Moreover, if the gadgets are computers, the same old teaching becomes incredibly more expensive and biased towards its dullest parts, namely the kind of rote learning in which measurable results can be obtained by treating the children like pigeons in a Skinner box. –Seymour Papert, father of Constructionism

During Season 4, Episode 3 of IMMOOC, John Spencer described his journey with technology and how his thinking has evolved around its use. As I listened to him speaking about using Scotch tape to mend microfiche, my head just kept unconsciously nodding. Oh, how I could relate! And I wholeheartedly agree with his lesson from this experience.

What is transferable, what is powerful and what stayed forever has been getting to think critically, getting to be creative, getting to problem solve-all of that. To me, when people get focused on the technology, they are going to end up inevitably doing is getting obsessed with the novelty.

I think this is an important lesson for all of us educators to consider. How can we focus on transferable skills vs. technology skills? Is knowing how to touch-type going to be a game changer for my 1st grader’s future OR is understanding how we organize and create systems to improve our capacity to do more and communicate more of our best selves and solve problems the answer?

Obviously, my question is rhetorical. And maybe you are wondering what “QUERTYs” you have in your school culture and classrooms–what old fashion practices and tools are you perpetuating, with or without the use of technology? Let’s start to make genuine progress by challenging and “breaking” them. Because by accepting the “status quo” in education, like un-imagining “the keyboard”, just makes us look slow and stupid.

If You’re Not Struggling and Embarrassed, then You’re Not Teaching Digital Natives.

By Judy Imamudeen | May 3, 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Back in 2006, my 4th-grade colleague, Mr. Glenn patiently tutored me in using wikis and blogs. I gave it a whirl with my students but I really wasn’t very competent in my tech know-how to pull it off. Honestly, it took me YEARS before I’d get back on the horse again. Perhaps you can relate-As a teacher, you always feel like you are racing against the clock, trying to get all the standards taught and using tech just seemed so frivolous, so you forgo its use. I definitely suffered from technophobia as my awkward attempts caused more frustration than bore fruit. However, I didn’t stay marooned on this island for too long, as seeing my daughter engage with technology really compelled me to take a closer look at its use in learning. This blog actually is the outcome of this realization and it has evolved from an exploration and curiosity to my digital professional portfolio to being a reflective tool of my educational interests and practices.

I remember early in my teaching career a well-intentioned high school administrator told me that a “good teacher” can teach anything. I felt like a really terrible teacher for a long while, thinking that I was somehow grossly incompetent because I couldn’t successfully coach volleyball (never played it competitively) or teach Spanish (I studied French). It took me changing schools to see what ridiculous advice this was. But c’mon– Like who can teach cross-stitch or linear algebra without any previous knowledge or training? Well, let’s just call bulls@#$t on that! And that is why this “good teacher” is a student rather than trying to wing it with a textbook. You cannot teach what you don’t have any experience in, let alone knowledge of.

So, later when I went back to 4th grade I realized that I had been digging up dinosaur bones for too long and avoiding technology. Yes, I could app smash and flip my lessons, but I really wasn’t moving my students from being “consumers” i dare to teach nto “creators”, which is what I now define as the purpose of using technology in our classrooms. Plus, I really wanted to move them to the highest use of technology–Connection!-sharing their ideas and finding others in their “tribe” in the digital landscape. How could I possibly teach kids about stuff that I wasn’t actively doing myself? If I was going to get these kids prepared for their future, I had to be a 21st-century learner right along with them. I couldn’t possibly blindly ask them to create something unless I could somehow mentor them. That’s exactly when I started to get serious about blogging.

You see blogging is about one of the most humiliating things you can do, other than getting really smashed at a party and stripping down to your undies. Your ideas and thinking are “naked” and it has the potential to be seen by tons of people. You can sound like an idiot and these online ramblings leave a digital footprint. So, not only can your current boss and colleagues see what kind of fool you are, but your future boss and co-workers can too. But I have to do it because I want to teach to the future and not to the past. The expectations of my students to be creators are going to be higher since being “googleable” is a prerequisite for their job search. There’s no way I can teach them about digital citizenship and managing their online life if all I ever do is post an occasional Facebook update and never become a contributor to the World Wide Web myself. Seriously, how could I actually help them navigate these waters?

Now I’m teaching myself about podcasting. It’s not hard, but it ain’t easy. In case you were thinking about it, there’s all this stuff that you need to know about creating quality sound, editing tracks, uploading it onto feeds and publishing it. Plus you need to have graphic art for your podcast and I have to design a logo and description for it. Geez! I haven’t used GarageBand in years and it is a heck of a lot more complicated than I remember. I’m harassing our music teacher to tutor me in making audio tracks and how licensing works in the recording world. There’s a lot about copyright that I don’t know about. And writing a script is not the same as writing blog posts, let me tell you. (As an avid podcast listener, it’s annoying to hear aimless talking. My time is precious, so if the podcast is a bunch of blah-blah-blah, then why bother?-right?!) I worked on my podcast this weekend and I sound like such a boob. But it’s my first step. I have to remind myself that everything is hard at first but eventually it gets easier and more fun. However, I’m hopeful that I can take this experience into the classroom. I really want to have my students create podcasts for kids. I think that would be so fun.

So, what about you?–are you rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty with all this digital awesomeness or are you hiding behind your whiteboard and 3-ring binder? (No offense, but I see you.) I don’t think our children can afford to have Luddite teachers. Our world needs more courageous and tech-curious educators to not only help prepare them for their future but to help them create the future that they will live in.

Judy Imamudeen

judyimamudeen.com

Online Fire Drill and Lockdown Procedures

By Judy Imamudeen | March 25, 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

The more I embrace 21st-century skills as a learner, the more I recognize how much I inadvertently underserve my digital natives. And that became plain to me in the latest YouTube Live Chat with Jennifer Casa-Todd during the Innovator’s Mindset MOOC (#IMMOOC). These educators discuss how students need mentoring in their online life just as much as in their physical life. Some of their conversations included:

The impact of teaching students how to create a positive online digital image.
Fire drills and lockdowns–can we do that online?

As I listened to Jennifer Casa-Todd, it really got my head reeling a bit, thinking about how one’s digital footprint matters as much to what we do in our real life. As soon as they spoke about it, it seemed intuitive and easy to take for granted, but I know how much our digital and physical worlds can collide and affect the learning in a classroom.

And although platforms like Google Classroom, Edmodo and SeeSaw offer wonderful “training wheel” experiences, it pales in comparison with the interactions that one may encounter on YouTube, Facebook, blogs, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, WeChat and other sites in which comments are made and ideas are shared. So what happens when something goes wrong online?

Jennifer reminded us that schools often prepare students for emergencies with having fire and lockdown drills, and she suggests that we also practice that in the online environment as well. Having an action plan for when someone comes in hijacks your post with smutty language or disparaging remarks can be really helpful and it is a benchmark skill for our digital natives because at some point in their lives, someone is going to say something hurtful or they themselves might behave badly on social media. In the digital world, those sorts of things can be tracked down, and they need to consider the repercussions of those interactions.

In the event of spam or a nasty or negative comment, how one responds can either determine whether things go out of control or gets “locked down”. One thing that is important to remember that your site or your post is technically your responsibility to manage. So here are just some ideas that I’ve curated from other sources like this one that others can use to moderate their posts:

Delete or hide the post if it’s spammy. Leaving it there delegitimizes the value of your content.
Have members of your online community respond to the negative comment.
Respond to the commenter in a private message, preferably in a compassionate tone that is equal to the respect that you wish to have online.
Ignore it but keep posting other great ideas.
Address it, but with lightness, humility and/or humor. Intend to diffuse the situation.
If it really spirals out of control, and you have the opportunity to delete the post, then do so.
If other attempts to make peace with the hater fails, you can block or ban the person from commenting.

Hopefully, these give some good food for thought as to how to approach online interactions. However, one thing that they didn’t discuss in the session, but I think it’s worth noting here, is also preparing students if they post something that is ignored. Yes, in these learner management systems like Edmodo and SeeSaw, we have parents and other community members coming on and giving it a “like” or a positive remark, but more often than not, when you create content, it might rarely be viewed, let alone commented on or shared. Take, for example, a YouTube video that a student creates–EVERYONE wants their stuff to go viral, right? But what if it doesn’t-what if only your mom and dad and your best friend watch it? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen kids disappointed that their content was ignored or under appreciated by an audience. And I totally get the feeling of that because I blog. If no one reads or comments on a post, I wonder if my ideas are of value and worth sharing. Because of the high level of exposure that goes with digital media, this vulnerability can create self-doubt and anxiety, lowering one’s self-esteem. Since our children do not have the maturity and resilience that us adults have to not take this personal, we also have to develop their mindset when it comes to this factor as well, recognizing that the WHO consuming it isn’t as important as the WHY we create online.

I think approaching these aspects are critical to our digital natives and I’m grateful that I was able to reflect on how I might make a positive impact on teaching and learning that is relevant and meaningful.

Ancient World, Modern Times

By Judy Imamudeen | June 9, 2016 | Comments 1 comment

Have you ever taught a unit that you wanted to do over again-either because you bombed at it or because it was so engaging? Well I’m closing the year on a high because this unit went so much better than expected.

Our central idea was: Ancient civilizations have influenced many things in our modern world.

The art teacher and I decided to use the Greek civilization as our model for an influential civilization. The history of us provided the fodder for our discussions and then we began to talk about the Greek philosophers as we began tuning into and engaging into our unit. The students were intrigued by Socrates, mostly because he drank poison. These lively stories cultivated a keen interest in crafting questions that “hurt our brains” to think about, as we explored metacognition.

As we delved into aspect of the Greek civilization, I decided that I would focus on reading content of our unit on myths and legends, Greek and Latin roots in our English words, while developing their listing and speaking skills. I provided a variety of media sources other than books, and decided to introduce them to podcasts to add a twist to the listening skills. Listen Current was a great resource and provided listening guides for their podcasts which was very ELL friendly and helped us to tackle challenging vocabulary terms.

I asked them what ancient cultures they were curious about and explained that we would do podcasts, in which they interview each other about their civilizations.They were so excited, which genuinely surprised me. It was hilarious to see them craft questions for these interviews that were meant to “hurt each other’s brains”, going deeper than their typical questions. We used the app Spreaker Studio to create very simple podcasts.

The podcasts took longer than I expected, as they needed more guidance with writing scripts and all those tricky questions made it a bit of a challenge to find research materials that were at their reading levels. However, it created a need to find multiple sources of information and it was a true RE-SEARCH unit, in which they had to keep reading, watching videos and keep looking for information on the internet. They would stop and discuss their civilizations naturally and made a lot of great connections. The students researched the Aztecs, Chinese, Egyptians, Incas, Mesopotamians, Mayans, Norse, Romans and Nubians.

My co-teaching partner and I had talked about having the kids put together a “museum of ancient history” as summative task, but the podcast ended up taking up more time than we expected and instead we had them decide to take something that we take for granted in our modern world and trace it back to its ancient roots. Students chose topics that resulted from some things that they learned about from these podcasts–from armor to lipstick, from books to medicine. It was a rich variety of topics. The kids made “fortune tellers” that described the why and how of this invention, and then they shared them, taking turns with each other.

Although I would do things a bit differently if taught again, it is a good feeling to know that our students can appreciate the drive, creativity and curiosity of ancient people. I was generally concerned if this was too heavy of a history unit, but the curiosity and motivation sustained itself.

Have you ever taught a unit that you thought would be awful and turned out great OR vice-ver
sa, you thought it was going to be wonderful and turned flat? I wonder what makes students’ so committed to their research on topics.

Teaching Patterns

By Judy Imamudeen | June 14, 2015 | Comments 0 Comment

I love teaching patterns, particularly in the beginning of the year so we can keep referencing them throughout the year. However, this year, my programme of inquiry had patterns being taught last with my homes unit (Where we are in place and time: People make their homes in different places and in different ways). Since I do a balance of integrated math and stand alone, the student really enjoyed going on pattern hunts as we looked at different homes, along with discussing and creating brick patterns. I thought I was doing a pretty good job when one of my 4 year olds turns to me and says, “You know Ms. Judy, we learned patterns last year in EY3 and we are pretty good at it. I think we should learn something else.” Krikey! Out of the mouths of babes, I was properly told off. So I reflected on what we were doing and decided to add symmetry into the mix.

After the topic was introduced, out came the mirrors and rulers, and the children began exploring how to create mirror image patterns: symmetry. They were absolutely captivated. Although I don’t have any pictures of the early explorations (I was too busy helping them hold mirrors) , I would like to share some of the later activities.

In the first set of pictures, we clamored upon the playground, drawing lines of symmetry with some chalk, and then the children worked as partners, taking turns making patterns with various manipulatives, which the other had to copy. They did a great job, and even helped to create the PicCollages that you see. Later on, we worked with the app, Geoboard, by The Math Learning Center, to create symmetrical patterns. Again they did fantastic job, and worked very cooperatively, much to my chagrin. At last, we just got plain silly and used the app Photobooth by Apple to create symmetrical pictures using the “mirror”. Some of the kids took those images and recorded ideas and stories using the app Fotobable. It was a wonderful way for them to extend their idea of patterns, and they did such a wonderful job working together to collaborate on the images.