Te Kowhai and iPads

Wow what a great afternoon learning from other like minded teachers experimenting with the use of iPads in the classroom. I felt it was a great sharing opportunity with both parties learning something new. It was great to see that even though we are both using pic collage we could see different uses for this app. My class are confident in using this app now and will often ask to go on it and create a pic collage learning tennis or gymsport etc. This app is being used in more of a showcasing way as a collection of photos in my class. One thing I started doing as I introduced these different apps was to ask the kids how else could this be used?  This is something I think I need to go back to and do more of. It was cool to see Te Kowhai using it to take photos of maths learning with materials out and basically writing what their WALT is in the middle. Another great use for this app and one I will be trialling in class. 

They also introduced us to a fantastic thinking hats tool. The teacher had used it for topic work but I could see how this would be great as a reading follow up, during shared reading as well as topic and I am sure much more as I experiment more with it. It was great that it reminded the kids what each hat stood for and could be uploaded to their blog. I think I might trial this first with a reading group, but it could have some value as a self assessment type of tool during our designing of our wearable art outfits as well???

Educreations was another app that they talked about which is very similar to the show me app. Except the benefit of educreation is that it has several pages. I know this is a problem some of my boys run into when they are explaining and they write too big running out of space. I also liked that with educreation you can upload a photo. It could be great to get the kids to work out a problem using materials take a photo and upload it. Then they could record what the materials stand for and how it shows the process of reaching the answer.

I loved the idea of the visual poet app it could be used in so many ways, sequencing their writing, sequencing a shared book, a collection of photos with key words, social stories etc. I think this app is one that needs time to explore all the possibilities it has.

Scratch was another really cool app for writing time. It split your screen in half, one half being a website and the other a notepad. One of their teachers used the website side to bring up an image from the Internet and then get the kids to write key words, describing words to do with the picture on the other side. I am not sure yet if you can import your own photos on the website side if you can you could take a picture of one page of a reader and get the kids to make notes about what is happening on this page, what this page shows etc.

They also talked about A+ spelling test which I have seen before. It is great for recording the kids weekly spellings words and saying them in a sentence. Then the kids can test themselves during spelling time. The same with spelling app spellasaur.

Grammar wonderland and parts of speech were other good apps for getting kids to work in small collaborative groups to refresh what nouns, verbs adjectives etc are and identifying which word is a noun etc. The parts of speech one even gave you a pie graph of what they got and what they need work on almost like a mini PAT analysis.

Talking to Krystal after the session the seniors talked about a cool maths slide app to teach the kids to use the iPad in a collaborative sense. It also keeps that competitiveness going to get the kids having a quick recall of their basic facts. It also means no one needs to be the teacher with some of the games I have got my less confident mathematicians doing I have needed a more able mathematician to be the teacher to make sure they are getting the answers right.

Some great ideas that I can't wait to start experimenting with! A very worthwhile afternoon.

Maths=Dancing

I love this idea of getting the kids to move to learn maths.
I can see how this will help with symmetry, rotation, translation etc miming the kids buddies movements.
Angles with tell them to move 90 degrees to their right etc.
I can also see how it could be useful with algebra and getting kids to see patterns getting them to come up with 4 counts and getting the buddy beside them to tell me what would come next.