iPads in your School – Where do you even Start? – Switched On ICT – iPad Units

If like many schools you have taken the leap  from the safety of your ICT suite over to mobile iPads, then you could probably do with a bit of help to navigate through this to the exciting new world of apps and anything goes. This was a situation I found myself in a few months ago. In the ICT room I knew where I was it was safe, you had  a scheme and the suite of software you used to teach the curriculum was finite.  You knew where to save, where to upload to and it all made sense, but it could also be predictable and limiting. Although I am sorry Mr Gove, I and many of my other esteemed colleagues rarely if ever taught a boring ICT lesson!

Back to the iPads. For a few months I muddled through trying out apps, talking to colleagues via twitter and attending events like those held at Elm Park Primary or at Apple in Regent Street. This is part of the fun, but I do remember thinking I wish there was something I could just pick up and run with, a course or set of notes from someone who has been there before. There are books like iPads in Education for Dummies, which is OK and I managed to plough through a chapter or two, or the more digestible and cheaper Educator’s iPad by Chris “Shambles Guru” Smith. Enter Switched On ICT and their iPad units. What you get is a growing series of tried and tested lessons that feel like they have been written and tried out in UK classrooms.

Here is a video of myself and my ICT Team Partner and electronic music guru Steve Hawke talking about the Projects

The iPad Projects pack is well suited to a school that is moving steadily and strategically into iPad adoption. It contains two exemplars of using iPads in a cross curricular context. These are Mind Mapping and Ebook creation. These lessons appealed to me as a seasoned know it all cynic, but I also felt that I could hand them to teachers who were less confident with the devices as they are detailed and clear.

For us as a school this pack helped us align the iPads to the full Switched On ICT scheme in the form of a matching chart of apps to units. I wouldn’t say I agree with all of these but most of them are spot on!  You also get access to a free Online course on using iPads in school, which is something I wish I had access to months ago.  It acts as a strong induction and introduction to the technology. It is ideal for those who are starting out on iPad integration, though I picked up some new tips and ideas too!

Mind Mapping apps are explained and presented as a fantastic cross curricular lesson in the pack. Here is a photo of some of the work from my class, taken hurriedly on another iPad.

For me this pack is very good value for money for any school on the iPad journey. It should be on every ICT Coordinators desk, or better still in the PPA room.

We are Musicians – a Music Coordinator Tells us How he does it

I recently chatted to my colleague, Steve Hawke, our music coordinator who has been inspiring me with his work with our iPads. He has been using an app called Figure to teach his Year 4 children aspects of music covered in Switched on ICT  along with other aspects of the Music curriculum.

The app he mentions is Figure, which is available on the app store and is very popular with our Key Stage 2 pupils.

 

Related articles

• Coding, Computer Science and iPads – My Current View (antsict.wordpress.com)
• Tools, Sites, Apps and Stuff you have to read w/c 11th March 2012 (antsict.wordpress.com)
• iPads in the classroom: embedding technology in the primary curriculum (guardian.co.uk)

My Custom Soundboard good for Early Years Switched On ICT and other Year Groups

I discovered this app a few weeks ago when I was looking for something to use with Foundation Stage for an Early Years  Switched On ICT lesson. The lesson “We have Confidence” outlined creating and playing a game using a Power-point slideshow. This would feature images of the class and associated sound files. Essentially - click on a picture of a child – listen and identify who is speaking. I knew there must be an app that would help us to do this in a more efficient and enjoyable way. The Powerpoint creation would essentially involve photographing, sound recording and formatting it  all good but a bit of a pain.

At this point I discovered by Custom Soundboard – an app for combining pictures and short audio recordings to create a soundboard. The app works as follows:

• Tap an empty square
• Take a photograph or choose from the library
• Record a short audio clip
• Play back your audio
• Redo or move to the next box

I tried this with our Foundation pupils a couple of weeks ago and by play time we had worked together  and created a class sound board which we then plugged into the AV system. The pupils loved tapping on their picture and hearing the playback of their little speeches, mostly “My name is and I want to be ….”. Unlike the same task using Powerpoint we could very easily edit or retry the parts of the board that needed rerecording or sharper photographs. I am hoping the children will now begin creating some of their own boards.

The other win in using this app is that you are actually hitting a greater number of ICT skills. We can sometimes forget about skills teaching or assume they are there innately, when we use iPads with young children.  However just because Foundation Stage pupils can easily play games and progress through Learning apps, it does not always mean that they have some of the necessary ICT skills needed to create and/ edit their own media effectively. Consider the skills the children learned in this unit and with this app, versus the digital baby sitting / just playing that can sometimes be the diet of Foundation Stage pupils.

1. Gain familiarity with the function and buttons of a new and unfamiliar app
2. Taking a Photograph
3. Reviewing the photograph to ensure the full head was present and having the confidence to reject and retake the picture if necessary
4. Recording sound and editing/rerecording if necessary

Other uses for Custom Soundboard:

Create a pictorial wordbank to aid spelling use images   of words ( perhaps created in Keynote first)and speak/record  the accompanying words. This would be very useful for children with English as an additional langauge or children with communication difficulties.

• PSHE – ask children to collect positive and supportive comments about themselves from their classmates
• Develop a personal set of alphabet Flash Cards
• Collect views about an issue and present these to the class
• Make notes about a science investigation or other problem solving exercise and use this digital record to aid in writing up
• Use the app to create a mystery with each photo revealing a clue or part of a story – this could lead into story writing or perhaps Maths with clues being related to properties of shapes or even coordinates.

Though this is a great app it would be even better if there were some way to export the boards or add more than one.

 

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Teachers Pet App – Like the Argos Catalogue for Teachers

For busy teachers who need quality resources, there are probably two sites we turn to. One is Teaching Ideas and the other is Teachers Pet. Though, if I am honest I have them both on separate Chrome tabs when I am on the hunt for something for my classroom. In the past, I was probably quite snooty about sites that offered labels, word banks, posters and the like to teachers. I though teachers should make their own. But, that view was held when I was working as a consultant and I actually didn’t have my own class.

And now I am a teacher again, marking and planning take up most of my time, as indeed they should. I don’t have the time to make my own posters about parts of speech,magnets, materials, space travel or story writing. Though I may create a very interactive whiteboard file or Powerpoint on the topic, it can often be a very ephemeral resource. I often find I want to return to a topic or a teaching point a few days after I first flashed it up on-screen. Having effective and well placed visual descriptions in the room can offer a longer term reminder of key facts for my class and an aide memoir for me. They help and prompt me and my pupils during lessons on a mostly daily basis.

The resources I use from Teachers Pet are bright, colourful and very clear. I use them around my classroom and point them out during teaching, particularly at the moment when we are focussing on strengthening our understanding of parts of speech.

So, now it is even easier to browse for these resources. Now we have an app, or at least a soon to be released app from the TPet Team. I was asked to test a version of the app last week and I have since spent some time playing with it. As I was testing I was looking for bugs and glitches , but there weren’t any that I could see. Pages turned smoothly, buttons behaved, screens rendered very quickly and search boxes delivered as they should. Perhaps I had missed something.

This app is effectively a regularly updated index of thousands of useful and essential classroom resources.But then so is their website. However, I am struck by how much more natural it feels to flick and browse through these on a tablet. For regular iPad and IOS users like myself it feels so much less like work to pick up the iPad on the sofa and skim through for a space poster or writing targets , rather than powering up the ageing laptop or PC. Yes there is so much here, but the app still feels clean and tidy with lots of white space and not a hint of advertising or distraction. I think I’d like to see a similar app offering from the TES Resource bank and the collected works of Pie Corbett and then I may not have to power up my computer very often at all.

Download the app from here

Infinite Thinking Machine

The Infinite Thinking Machine is a great 5 minutes of fast paced US education focussed technology news and stuff.

Here is their latest episode, I particularly like their report on what teachers could learn from Youtube. While their list of tools to introduce programming include some tools even I’d not heard come across before.

Worth a 5 minute viewing

App of the Day: Class Charts

I came across this browser-based admin tool in the Christmas holidays and it has taken me until now to get round to sharing it with you. Upon first glance you may dismiss this very useful and time-saving tool as another behaviour management system. Well I did at first! But look beyond this and you will realise that this tool can really help improve your assessment and class admin workflow.

As a busy teacher you are required to be data fluent about your class. I am often asked for levels and groupings and about the progress of individuals or groups. For many teachers this is kept on spreadsheets and of course softer data is stored mentally. I have tried for some time to make the flow of accessing this material easier. I had experimented with Bento and other simple databases, but if a tool or app is cumbersome then you tend not to use it for long, Class Charts feels different. For me Class charts allows me to access a range of essential information about the class by clicking through a seating plan graphic that you create. And alongside this I am able to easily record and track behaviour, all with full customisation and individual reporting.

A further bonus to Class Charts, aside from the fact that is free is that it is also collaborative, you can work with other adults who teach your class on this site too.  Try it out by registering on ClassCharts.com.

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