4th Grade Interactive Plant Diagrams
Fourth graders at Davis Elementary have been learning about plant anatomy and life processes (SOL4.4), so today students in Mr. Cochran’s class created interactive plant diagrams using ArtPad and ThingLink. I usually use ArtPad in the lower grades, but older grades love it too, and it’s a great tool for creating a quick drawing. The students used ArtPad to draw their plant, then they used the snipping tool to get a screenshot of it, and they uploaded it to ThingLink. Next they added icons to label the parts of their plant. Each icon can be customized to show text, images, videos, and links that appear when a visitor rolls over the icon. The students wrote sentences describing the function of each part, and they also linked to the ArtPad replay of their drawing (since they really liked that feature). Finally they posted the links to their interactive diagrams on Google classroom so their classmates could see their work. You can explore a few examples here. I was impressed to see that some students went on afterwards and used ArtPad to draw maps of the regions of Virginia like this.