The digital books created by our talented Year 6 students have been in the iBooks Store now for a week or two and we knew that many of our own classes have been downloading them and reading them. Some classes have even invited the authors in to share their books with the whole class which is a tremendous opportunity for the authors but also fantastic for the younger students to see their older peers in the role of a published author. Imagine a tiny 6 year old sitting there and hearing that there are tools that make it possible for him or her to not only create their own books but then to publish them online for people all over the world to see!
We have also been excited to see that in the iBooks Store there is the capacity for our audience to write a review of the book. Currently we have a few already added and they are displayed below. A couple of readers were commenting on how they were going to read them with their own children. There were also some teachers commenting on them on behalf of their own class – presumably sitting there with their class and collaboratively deciding on the comments they could make about the structure of the narrative or the art component or the key themes. It’s interesting to think about the potential of this experience to contribute to the rich learning from the year that has occurred in English. In English, narratives are often the focus of study for many year levels and our Australian Curriculum pinpoints different elements to be a focus at different points across Prep – Year 10.
When we think about technology use as teachers, we can use a model called the SAMR model to consider how rich the use has been in terms of transforming the learning experience. Using technology that enables the creation and global publication of texts but also technology that allows us to access, download and then review these same texts has meant that this experience has been at the ‘transformative’ level of this model – meaning that the technology has allowed for the creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable.
