ICT Connected Cluster

The latest connected session at Southwell was another useful afternoon seeing where we are placed with our ICT journey and what new ideas are out there to experiment with.
Marcelle, Asri and I presented about gathering student voice using tools such as fotobable, audioboo and voicethread.
At the end of our session a teacher talked about a tool called photosnack that she uses to create slideshows of her photos. This could be another app to display a series of photographs when you have a collection.
Our class and individual blogs became a talking point following our discussion on voice tools. There were a few teachers who were struggling to get things up on their blogs or hadn't started one and once again this re-enforced our reasons for having blogs.
-Sharing our learning with our family and friends
-Reflecting on our learning
Plus it is always nice to reflect on how far we have come on this journey so far.

The second session I went to was on Apple TV.
To me it sounded very similar to our interactive teaching stations with the mobi being replaced by an i-pad. I guess the difference being though that you can push the TO SHOW button in the corner of the i-pad and bring it up on the big screen TV. At any time you can swap between the i-pads that you bring up and also that you can record sound through them. One advantage being for those that are shy to report back to the whole class you could pre-record their ideas on the i-pad and share it back through on the TV.
Another good way to use the ability to swap between i-pads is if you set a maths group a problem you could have them working in pairs on i-pads and if a group gets stuck you can flick it up onto the TV and get everyone to help them solve it. How can the class help from here?

One great management strategy the teacher used was that she took a screen shot of the i-pad app and put that on the task board for the group(s) that were using the i-pad(s) for that reading/writing/maths/spelling session. This meant that when they were independently working they knew exactly what they were looking for.
I could then link this in with the class experts wall where you could have experts names next to the app screen shot so that if people get stuck on a particular app they can ask the expert for help.
Since I am now trying to give my kids choice in their rotations I could put up three or so app photos and they can choose the one they think best suits the need of the task.

The rest of the session was spent looking at apps that they used in their class. One good looking spelling one was Spelling Test. With this app kids could make their own spelling tests on the i-pad, record their voice so say the word and put it in a sentence and then they have to spell it. Then you can go back and view the test scores which was always good for assessment purposes.
Could be a good way to motivate students to practice their spelling words....

Reading Comprehension Grade 2-3 also looked like a good app for reading obviously testing their comprehension. Giving them a text to read and then asking a range of questions to do with that text.

Sock Puppets is one that I have seen on our i-pads at school but it was interesting to see another way this teacher used the tool. She got the kids to share what they had learnt. Eg: (Sock Puppet 1) What did you learn today? (Sock Puppet 2) Today I was learning.... I am still to find out if you can embed the sock puppet show to a blog. It would be nice to capture what a child was learning to do or give an example of how they achieved their learning intention and put it up on their blog to share and have that sample to go back to.

The teachers presenting with Apple TV also talked about Notability a lot as this allowed them to record voices instead of always having to write and this seemed like another good app particularly if you are using the i-pads like our mobi, and were able to talk to your writing of how you were solving a maths problem like kids might with voicethread. Or kids could read a passage and record their answer to the question verbally rather than written.

There are a lot of apps out there and I have found that we are using a lot of Web 2 tools effectively. Now introducing i-pads and pods and the Apple products I am finding a lot of the apps are similar and have a similar function to others we are already familiar with. So I guess as I am being exposed to more apps I need to keep asking myself;
-What is the purpose of this app?
-How can the kids use it not just for substitution but for transformation?