Giving Longer Responses via the Ipad

Today I taught RE and our theme was Special Places.

I used Youtube to talk about one place where I spent a very long time for many a month, the good old A406, which made up around 2-3 hours a day during my days at 2Simple.

We then contrasted this with a look at  a holiday favourite of mine, rural Snowdonia, which as a place would involve a degree of pilgrimage and effort to get to. However the climb and the exhaustion is all worth it when you can sit and survey the panorama of natural beauty at the summit.

Thanks to Photosynth and my IWB we were able to stroll around the mountain and skirt around the lake and take in some of the awe and wonder.

Here is a link to the Photosynth we looked at today of Snowdon, just in case it is not displaying in your browser.

But what of the children and their special place, this was not something all of them would feel comfortable talking or writing about and yet they each had interesting and relevant ideas to share.

Using a google form I had created earlier, I asked the children to write their answers to some key discussion and reflection points. We were fortunate in that ecah child use an Ipad to access a link I had made on the desktop to the form. In this way the Ipad acted as a giant and more attractive response system.

As they wrote I had the response spreadsheet up on-screen, this meant we could read their answers, but not necessarily know who wrote them. And as such we had both points for discussion and anonymity at the same time.

A simple but effective use of Google Forms and here is a link to over 75 more ways you can use them in your teaching.

Guided Reading Independent Activity with IPads

Just thought I’d share something that worked well today during guided reading this week.

I had been thinking about how I could make more of the Ipads during Literacy and Guided Reading, but I did not really want to spend anymore cash on elaborate ebooks or do something for the sake of it.

I came up with an authentic context using the World Book Day App and a google form. The app contains extracts from books and some specially written full texts too. The authors featured have already proved popular with some of my class and certainly texts like Charlie Higson’s Zombie series look  very appealing to my year six boys!

The task could have been look at the books in the app that i have downloaded for you and keep out of my hair while i read with my focus group, but to give it authenticity and focus I included the survey and recommendation aspects too.

Once children had skimmed through or even lost themselves in one  the ebooks, they could then take the opportunity to fill out the details on a google form. As they entered their details into the form they  their preferences appeared live on the whiteboard at front of the class in spreadsheet form, I made the form and the accompanying data accessible to other members of staff too!

In this way I could keep an eye on who had completed the task and who needed to add more to their entry. What’s more – and this is where the authenticity comes in – the Literacy coordinator now had an idea as to what texts to order for upper key stage 2, or at least my class.

An example of one of the responses :

After reading through some Anthony Horowitz, one boy submitted this via the google form:

We should have this book in our school because it is an action packed adventure book that I’m sure all of the boys would love! I would recommend this book from age 9 to 14. There are a series of these books which are all particularly exciting , we could make a decision on either getting this book or getting a different one from the series.

A note about google forms

These are very easy to create, but the url they generate is very long. I would suggest using a service like bit.ly to shorten the web address. You could also use add to home screen on the Ipad, which will create an icon on your ipad pointing to the google form.

Doing it this way also makes the children believe it is another app. There is a helpful video on creating a google form here.