Tuesday 24 May 2016

Day 63 - All sorts

Single apps or a multitude of apps? For lots of reasons dominant apps which can be accessed by a wide variety of ages and abilities are for me more rewarding and nurturing and deserve a place in my classroom. A champion app needs to have all sorts of uses for students to include the iPad across the curriculum, certainly not restricted to a specific subject area, to justify its place on the mobile devices.

So what did I use in the classroom today? 

Firstly, Trilby Tv was refreshed in the library and the screen was instantly rich with examples of excellent ways in which the students & teachers communicate their learning.  From the QR codes on the displays containing links to the video diaries of the geography field work trip , generated by the public link in the app, to a collection of still images punctuated by captions and comments. The screens echoed to the delightful sound tracks which signalled the ePub books made in Book Creator exported directly to photos as a movie file. This enabled the Students to directly upload to the screens as easily as 1,2,3...with huge smiles on their faces.  Their teacher could also instantly recognise the appropriate use of connectives, nouns and accurate SPAG! 


Book Creator has been used to record the thoughts and diary entries of each team entering the computing competition. The books pages are filled with sound bites, videos discoveries and comments on how their games, coded in Scratch and using a Makey Makey for an alternative controller, are being evaluated, refined and edited as a result of peer assessment and additional mentoring. 

Book Creator was further used as an individual digital profile to show progress made in hitting the Early years targets (reception) and consolidating phonics (year 1&2)  In partnership with the cursive writing wizard app the students are developing their cursive writing as they become more confident in sounding out their stories...chooseday became - Tuesday  fansy dress cossoome became - fancy dress costume and prinsess - became princess. The sound capture enables the children to write their own. Vocabulary word list and speak their word (hearing their own voice is such a confidence booster) whilst it is displayed on screen in the correct cursive formation, with the ability to trace the letters properly. 

Cursive Writing Wizard - Kids Learn Joined Letters by L'Escapadou
https://appsto.re/gb/4E8kT.i

Using VPP the price of the app is greatly reduced and as a class set resource, common word lists are easily shared to support word recognition and formation. 

This is developed further in the school by encouraging students in Key Stage 1 to speak their stories before the process of writing. This has been made possible by the introduction of Adobe Voice. The progress is rapid in the sentence structure and construction of language written in pen within their exercise books. 

Book Creator is such a creative app which allows my students the chance to stamp their personality on their tasks, providing them with the opportunity to enjoy, experiment and be flamboyant about being creative. Year 6 continue to add references and pages to their Shakespearean dictionary - Shakespearean words are defined but sound memos allow the children to be transported back to the Tudor age with quotes from the playscript puts the alien-words into a contempary context. 

Year 5 have are been adding to their ePub template by inserting screen shots of refined coding blocks as they tweak and develop their Scratch game. It's good that tasks can be returned to and worked on beyond the lesson usual timetabled duration. 

As a personal reflection, I sat and watched the celebration screens around the school. As I watched, I was bowled over by the variety and scope of the work that the digital citizens in our school can communicate and share. Their work is exceptional in parts and wonderfully wacky and individual in others. But some how it works. Learning has been transformed and through Trilby Tv has managed to reach and 'infect' others with the excited buzz that the digital learning continues to bring. 






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