Wow! What a busy term! But in that time there has been a lot of great learning too for both the kids and myself. Attending an ICT course in the holidays I learnt about exploring the ipad and layering the apps. I have always been aware of using the ipad in a productive way so that it doesn't just become a babysitter or give kids 'busy' work. But this course made me think even further about it.
Since attending that course I have shared back the information at a staff meeting with Te Kowhai and at the term ICT Connected Cluster. It has been great to see kids playing games that they love like Maths Slide but then taking a screen shot and posting it on their blogs reflecting and setting goals for the next time they play that game. Today it was awesome to see my Techsperxs coming back from their meeting and sharing what apps are good to use. They then took a screen shot of the apps, created a comic life, then put the comic life onto a pic collage and then loaded it onto the blog. A great example of layering but the best thing was that it was completely student driven with no teacher direction to layer the apps and get more out of them.
Something I want to do more of next term is our app wall in class. We are beginning to look at an app a fortnight. How can this help with our learning type reflective questions and getting the kids to tell me if it is a practice app, problem solving app, collaborative app etc and how can we make it more than just a practice app? Getting the kids to talk more about the benefits and justify why it should still be on our ipad and not removed.
This term I started a class twitter account. Some of the kids have really understood the benefit of twitter and are sharing links to their work encouraging people to comment and visit their blog which is great to see. We have also taken part in kidsedchat which the kids have enjoyed and gets them sharing with others around the country finding out what they are learning and again encourages questioning as they comment back to people.
