Fotobabble

Another successful app to use with young children.  A great way to record student voice - giving children the opportunity to publish their writing or to express their opinion about something they have learnt. It is easy for them to take a photo and to record, then listen and rerecord if they wish. Then this can be shared - via email to their parents or the link is copied and uploaded to their Padlet page (I am doing this for them at this point in time.)

 
Samantha explaining her garden plan; Scarlett talking about how a food pyramid keeps us healthy; Cooper counting in 5s.
Here are examples of how fotobabble can be used to record student learning - it also gives children the opportunity to talk to or about a topic without having to read a script - which is an important skill in itself!

Blogger - Our Class Blog

So simple! Using the iPad Blogger app has made it easy for the children to write a new post each day on our class blog. I was determined that by the end of Term One they would take responsibility for choosing the learning of the day that they wanted to share and be able to publish the post themselves. 
To achieve this I had to:

• set aside time each day to show 2 children how to take/choose a photo, write a title, write the caption, write their names as the labels
• suggest the photo/learning to share
• suggest an appropriate title, they could usually think of a sentence to write on the topic
• be available to edit their writing before publishing
• make sure that the task was shared around ans that everyone had a turn
• make sure that there were 4 children that were shown 

Educreations

 Our new FREE web tool – a special iPad app or use a laptop – http://www.educreations.com/

It is an interactive whiteboard that creates video lessons or explanations in a slideshow format. From a teacher’s point of view it has unlimited possibilities for children to become confident talking about their learning and sharing it in an exciting, motivating, e-learning way.

The features of Educreations:

• Write text or draw lines or pictures with a pen using different colours
• Write text with a keyboard
• Take photos or import photos from a folder or your camera roll
• Import pictures from the web
•  Add more pages to your slideshow
•  Add audio or talk along with your slides
• Save and share your slideshow – email, Twitter, embed it into a blog or wiki page
• You will need to sign up with an email account to share it

Ways we could use Educreations 

• share research about a zoo animal
•  explain how to solve a maths problem
• share a book that has been read
• explain how to make something

It's best to plan the slideshow - load up each page with photos, text, practise what to say or write it down, then add voice for each page

The 2 weaknesses I can see are:

 Having to record all slides in one session – you can’t go back and edit once saved

 If you make a mistake with your voice recording you have to start all over again

Only disadvantage is that you can't save the talk for each page - you have to delete the whole voice recording if you make a mistake

Maths -
Talking through / explaining maths learning - eg showing doubles, mult problems, evidence from weighing activities - photos, diagrams, add voice
Literacy Ideas -

Book review - captions, photos, story with pictures/ photos, photos with captions + voice
http://www.educreations.com/lesson/view/maori-places/9197099/
http://www.educreations.com/lesson/view/zoo-animal-tagxedos-by-zach-thomas-and-kartik/8950885/
http://www.educreations.com/lesson/view/ipads-please/9073114/

Audioboo - another favourite to use again in 2014

248 boos for 2013! Wow what a lot of fun and it shows how popular and easy this app is to use. We used it as an activity in our Daily 5 reading rotation - read a poem and record on Audioboo using the iPad, listen to your recording and self assess whether you want to save it or rerecord - or listen to someone else's boo. 

Everyone few days we would choose a few boos to listen to and using our 'Star and a Wish' system we would assess them - by the end of the year the children were quite used to hearing their own voice without feeling embarrassed and were taking on board the advice of their peers.

A Star = something good about the reading
A Wish = something to improve for next time

The children would often choose to embed a boo onto their Kidblog page or would often want to tweet it.

The other use for Audioboo was to record the children reading during a running record. I never did play it to a parent during a meeting but it was useful for me or for a child to listen to the change over time - comparison from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.

2014 - Using The Blogger iPad App

Student voice and all that - the children will be rostered on to take a daily photo of classroom learning and be responsible for writing the caption. Hopefully this will take the blog into more homes and will mean more parents will use the blog and maybe leave comments and feed back for the children - an authentic audience for their writing. The Blogger app for the iPad has made posting photos and captions so easy that all I need to do is check and edit the writing before publishing.

Kidblog - sharing an individual child's work online

http://kidblog.org/Space10sBlog/

Half way through the year I was having doubts about our class Wikispace pages. I was always fixing errors with the children's posts. They found it hard to remember to write posts chronologically and I would find their writing in all sorts of mixed up places on their page. Uploading photos and leaving comments was messy too. I feel wikispaces is probably suited to children older than my 6-7 year olds. Kidblog seems to be a cross between Blogger and Wikispaces, allowing a teacher to set up individual pages for each child in a class while still having control over each page. (Using Blogger meant having individual email accounts which seemed too big a step for Year 2s.) Writing posts was more organised and leaving comments was a lot easier.

The End of 2013 - Reflections

A VERY busy year! Heaps of new learning courtesy of the Learning and Assessment Team working in our school.

• so lots of trialing new ideas and modifying old ones - observations, student conferencing, videoing lessons, giving feedback to staff, children self and peer assessing, target and focus learners, writing and reading progressions, LLP and NZ Curric and National Standards resources, inquiry planning cycle, clarity of learning intentions, co-constructing success criteria, next steps.....  
• being given 4 new iPads to use making 5 in total plus 6 PCs and laptops meant Space 10 was a trial digital learning class - no pressure to maximize the use of all this hardware! Watch the Educreation slideshow the class made to request more iPads - very persuasive and it worked!

• trying to keep my own e-learning PD going as well as encouraging staff by keeping the gentle reminders going regarding the e-learning that should be happening in classes
• working on an e-learning strategic plan for the school with David Kinane and Clare

Keeping this blog updated has suffered from my time being taken up with these other commitments. So to make up for lost time the following posts are reflections on what I trialed in 2013 and my next steps for including and modifying for the new class of eager learners in 2014!

2013 - A New Year

Wallwisher becomes.....Padlet (a new, fresh look.)
A new year and lots of changes afoot. David Kinane, an e-learning consultant is working with us to get e-learning integrated into the classrooms. He suggested everyone becoming familiar with Wallwisher, an old friend for me. So it's easy to go with this but with a difference this time. The iPad and new laptop mean we can add a photo to our walls. We make all sorts of walls and embed them on our blog and our class wiki and on our own wiki pages.