Category Archives: Tips and Tricks

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Apr 28 2013

Tools, Sites, Apps and Stuff you have to read w/c 28th April 2013

Each week my Flipboard app, Twitter responses, my kids, my Kindle Fire and my Google reader deliver a collection of new web tools, apps, books, crazy experiences and must read articles.

Here is this weeks collection:

Face Film App

My thanks this week goes to Yan Jiangguo, who provided me with a code for his FaceFilm app. The app lets you morph

FaceFilm

two faces together with the whole smooth process outputting as a movie or an animated gif. So, as you can see opposite, you can use your iPad to stage your own Doctor Who style regeneration.

In terms of classroom use, this is one of those apps which could act as a writing stimulus. I would get my class to morph themselves into a character and write about how it feels to be that person, perhaps a soldier or a knight or an alien. These would look brilliant displayed on a class  blog with the writing coupled with the gif as an illustration for each story or poem. Possible themes could be going back in time or becoming a celebrity or world leader.

Addition and Subtraction for Kids

Add & Subt for Kids app iconBack when I had Year 1, I used to make a lot of worksheets and flip charts involving visual addition and subtraction. For younger children and those with processing difficulties number operations can be just too abstract. As a visual learner myself I have always been keen to bring Maths alive with pictures, role play and objects. Fast forward a few years and Leo my middle son presents with autism and learning difficulties. This means that though he can memorize almost all of the Tube network and a whole collection of number facts by playing Bond Bubbles, he still struggles with simple addition and subtraction. We can spend quite a while battling with 9-0 or 8 + 6 and yet he knows lots of pairs of numbers that will make 100 from rote memory.

Enter this app, Addition and Subtraction for Kids, with the visual prompts and scaffolding of moving sea creatures. It is an app that works well for him and has great promise. Though, I am not going to leap too far up and down for this app as it really lacks the customization and options that other developers like Frogmeleon or Teacher’s Pet give you. In fact if you are listening guys, please make an app like this but with the understanding of teaching and learning that I know you both have!

Purple Mash – Face Lift

I have recently moved schools and I am introducing new colleagues to Purple Mash, a project I began with 2Simple over two years ago. I am thrilled to see how the front page and navigation have moved up a gear. The screen now adjusts seamlessly to fill the browser window and the search tool for activities including drilling down by year and subject is fantastic. It is still not IOS compatible yet, though you can now view the front page on an iPad and further 2Simple apps are on the way.

purplemashnew

Teaching Packs

teachingpackslogo

Mark Warner, the man behind Teaching Ideas and other tried tested and enduring Teacher resource sites has created a new site. I was privileged to be able to test this new project over this last weekend and as expected it all looks good and will be another place we all go to for quality resources. Teaching Packs, hosts a small but growing collection of teaching and display resources on themes such as punctuation, times tables and pirates, though that list is growing. A small fee will allow you to download each very comprehensive pack or you could subscribe for the year, which costs around the same as a decent CD!

tpacksscreengrab

And finally

David Pogue: 10 top time-saving tech tips

How many of these tips, tricks and short cuts did you know about :

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Nov 15 2012

iPad Events Part 3 – Teachmeet iPad – Steve Bunce and Huntz

Here is another of our video presentations from Teachmeet iPad.

Steve Bunce, the Vital/ GBL man from the North, showed his commitment to innovation and CPD with this video. It has to be one of the most unusual, entertaining and fascinating Teachmeet video submissions I have seen. Steve takes us quite literally away from London and shows us examples of innovative ICT and apps in action. He then introduces us to the Huntz treasure hunting app.

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May 25 2012

“We done Some Research” using our IPADS

Pudú and friends.
Pudú and friends. by Lizette Greco

We did some research

We went on Google

These were two phrases I used to hear a lot when I was an ICT advisor. It meant the  teacher had been doing an internet research lesson, which at best could be a chance for the children to broaden their knowledge around a topic through a series of preselected sites. While at the same time strengthening and honing their research skills.

At worst pupils would come to the Google homepage with the same sense of confusion and boredom, that can occur when  faced with a blank page and asked to write a story. I learned quickly from my own lessons and those that I watched that children need prompts and guidance to research. Without these scaffolds and clarity of expectation, the output can be nothing more than cut and paste word documents or print outs of web pages. I remember a display of beautifully crafted leaflets. They had been made in Microsoft Publisher and though they looked very nice, closer inspection revealed that the text in everyone was merely a direct paste from either the BBC or Wikipedia. This is why web-quests gained popularity a few years ago, this technique worked as a sort of information treasure hunt and brought structure and focus to research work.

But real world research does not fit nicely into a linear set of questions as in a web-quest. We look for specific information and discover new questions, meanwhile the answer we seek may not be where we thought and we night need to try another site or page.

It strikes me there are 3 things to get right when using the internet as a text with your class:

1. Do it in a reading Session

Acknowledge that the internet is a giant sprawling hypertext book of information and  just like an information book, “a real book” or something from a dire reading scheme – YOU need to scaffold and support the children in crafting strategies for reading it. This means looking at how web pages are put together, discussing navigation, content, authorial intention, the effectiveness of design features as well as decoding and looking at new vocabulary. I have recently taken the step of including more on-screen web-based reading within my supported guided reading sessions, as we can not just assume that proficient technology use means a child can locate and easily extract and summarise information on a website.

2 Learn to search effectively.

I know I need to work on this with my class and I am keen to place context around and use the recent lesson plans from google on more efficient searching.


You can find them here.

3 Value the Output of the Research

By this i simply mean if children have to create a product with the information they find  then the engagement and end result is in my experience far better. In recent weeks my year 6 class have been using a selection of pre given sites and a mix of open-ended and more closed questions on our topics such as Michael Morpurgo , The Beatles and The Tolpuddle Martyrs. Their task has been to create a presentation using Key Note on their iPads based on their answers/ findings on the topic.

In order to set this up I created an Iwork account which the children share their work to when finished. Remarkably this has proved most successful when children have been paired on one device rather than having one device each,. At the front of the class I display our Iwork page, where each time a Keynote presentation is completed a thumbnail appears. This adds a gamification element as children are keen to see their work on the board, it also means as a teacher I can click on any piece of work in a mini plenary style and draw out with the class elements for development.

I have been surprised by how successful this method of data mining has become with my class and we now use it routinely when looking at any new topic. The Ipad has added a hook for disengaged and reluctant writers who have been keen to present their work in a form other than graphite and lined A4. I am acutely aware that this is no silver bullet and there is a need to reflect upon the effectiveness of this approach and look at other formats. It is worth looking at the ideas put forward by Simon Haughton on his blog, as he is someone who regularly writes on how pupils might present their internet research.

I’d be keen to know readers thoughts, so as always leave a comment or a tweet.

I men

May 2 2012

More IPAD Tips and Tricks.

Thank you to Lucinda Serle, who has just shared with me a very comprehensive page of  Apple Tips and Tricks. Lucinda has highlighted these pages from her own LA which have been put together by Gavin Richards.They are very useful for people just starting out in the field of IPads and Apple devices.. I particularly like the detailed points about printing and the details on add ons for the IPad.

See the Tips and Tricks page here 

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