This term feels like it has gone in the blink of an eye. I’m in such a lucky position – being able to work with teachers and students as they cooperatively travel along a learning journey during which their eyes are slowly opened to the potential of educational technology. This year we went from having one trial class in Year 4 to having 5 BYOiPad classes in Year 4 and 5 which was a huge shift. It is to the testament of the teachers involved in these classes that this shift has been gradual, calm and collaborative – and a direct result of the lessons learnt during 2014 with Mr Schultz and Mrs Sansness in the Year 4 trial class.
I’m well aware that devices such as iPads can be viewed as ‘gimmicky’ in educational settings and I’m absolutely confident that our journey means that these devices are being used as powerful tools to deepen and accelerate learning. For teachers to journey along this path, it takes the confidence to experiment and to explore. Being part of a collaborative and supportive team accelerates this process. Our teachers are focussed on curriculum outcomes and have the support of each other but also the freedom to try out their own way of doing things. These are three key elements to our success.
The ease with which you create on the iPad is a major benefit to their use in a teaching environment. I’ve worked with teachers and watched lessons where the students now have choice in how they explore ideas and present their findings. Choice is so important when it comes to students feeling ownership in their learning. Gallup-Poll surveys in Australia in the last 2 years have shown that from Year 5, students start disengaging from school. The solution for this is multi-faceted but making them more active participants in their learning is one thing we can do to stop this slide.
Students in Year 4 this term explored narratives by examining Roald Dahl’s The Twits. During this study, the students read, examine and analyse the language features and techniques used by the author. They create a new chapter of the narrative for an audience of their peers. The students used mind mapping to explore various concepts and to map them visually. The app, Inspiration was a great tool to do this and its use meant that the mind maps could be changed and added to over the course of the unit. They also plotted graphs representing the structure of a narrative. There is one example below:
Showbie is our management tool. The teachers post documents for the children to open and use it to collect completed or draft work. Feedback is also provided to students on their work with a view to them making it better. See an example of this below:
The children worked on various drafts of their chapter and then were able to publish it in Book Creator which allows them to add an audio of their story being read. This is an important feature of the process as it encourages fluency as the students are able to listen to it, give themselves feedback and also receive it from others before they publish or re-record. Here is an example of the eBook after it has been exported as a movie:
What a great outcome for these students! It is something about which to be quite proud. We are working on publishing a few of the best ones for uploading to the iBooks Store.