We Need iPads!

Funded Dec 31, 2014

I would first like to thank you very much for your generous donation you gave to me and my class. You have given my students the opportunity to be exposed to the wonders of technology. When the resources arrived my students were so thrilled! They could not wait to begin using them, they were so amazed because some of these students have never even had a computer let alone an ipad. I explained to them that these ipad would be used to help them learn new things and reinforce what we already learn here at school. They wanted to know if I bought them the Ipads because they began to thank me, I told them that they were donated with the help of a website called Donors Choose and also from Julie Kyes. They were very thankful for this amazing donation and addition to our classroom.

Being that my students come from a low socio-economic community it is hard for them to own things such as iPads or laptops or stand alone computers. The donation of the iPad's has really expanded their learning not only academically but they have acquired the knowledge of how this type of technology works. They had the opportunity to explore the fantastic apps that were available to them from the App Store, ranging from handwriting skills to adding and subtraction as well as learning how to read. This has also helped with behavior, they all look forward to being able to use one of the iPad's so it has served as great motivation for excellent behavior, truly a great form of positive motivation! Thanks to your generous donations from both Donors choose and Julie Kyes my students have gotten the opportunity to use Istation which is a program we use here at our school, Istation serves as a reading intervention as allows us the teachers to track their progress on it. The ipads truly allow the ones who do not have the means to have this type of technology at home, having it here at school gives them this great exposure to use Istation here at school. Istation is also part of their nightly requirement for homework and a lot of our students are not able to meet this requirement due to the lack of resources at home.

This project has helped my teaching and my students learning because it has made learning for them a lot more hands on. They truly get a lot from having the hands on experience as well as animations and the use of so many applications that can be located in the app store. It has also helped my teaching because I was able to download an app called Nearpod and on Nearpod I am able to create lessons using slideshows and animations. I can even browse different presentations that other teachers have created and link it to each ipad and have my small group students follow along. It has been great because I can even make a short assessment quiz on it and they see it as fun and forget that they are even learning. All in all this donation has been a huge improvement and has worked wonders in my classroom in many different ways! Thank you so much once again from my classroom and I for your generosity.”

With gratitude,

Ms. Ramos