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.
Hi Danielle
ReplyDeleteIt certainly was a very full learning session for us all. So many apps were covered, that teachers are having success with to support learning and teaching in the classroom. How many do you feel confident trialing at once? I sometimes worry that we may be scratching the surface of a lot of apps and not really getting to grips with them in any real depth.
I was really interested in your observations of how each school was using pic collage differently. This highlights for me how this one app / tool can be used to promote learning and cross curriculum and contexts. We also heard from teachers who had used Pic collage as a tool to record student thinking in a kind of brainstorm, with a concept in the middle and their understandings around the outside, or to record varying pre and post ideas of a maths group to show what they know about a particular strategy.
There is such a lot to trial and practice... which one first for you?
Myra
To Myra,
ReplyDeleteYes the scratching the surface is always a concern and I guess the pic collage shows this. You kind of get used to using a particular app for a particular thing and don't always think of other ways it could be utilised. And you are right that you can't do them all justice if you try to implement to much at once. I am going to try the maths slide game with my lower maths group. As I feel it will hold their attention, motivate them and hopefully speed up that basic facts recall that they need practice in. The other one I am going to trial is the 6 hats app. I have today used the big shared book for this week and put that as the title and posed questions under each hat for the kids to answer for me. I am looking forward to how this goes!
Danielle