Module 2

I use many of the built in apps on both my iphone and ipad.  But it was great to review them with my teacher/ classroom brain in, and think about how I could get my year 5’s to use these apps. 

Safari

I am fairly comfortable with safari, but I have now added our class website and my diigo bookmark site to the homescreen.  So easy to do!

Message app

I use the message all the time personally on my iphone and ipad but have not considered using it in the classroom. I have now set up the ipads to be able to message each other so students can send photos and videos from one ipad to the other.  This is convenient if one groups of students is using an ipad that has videos or photos on it that another groups needs, particularly as we cannot set up email on the ipads at school.   

Newsstand

I spent some time exploring newsstand.  The newsstand has some good free magazines.  We have 10 minutes of silent reading each day in class.  Some students would be able to read magazines on the ipads.  They could even read them in guided reading time.

Apple user guide- Camera

My students love using the camera on the ipad.  They love recording themselves and their classmates and taking photos of their work.  The beauty of the ipad is the front camera allows the students to take photos or videos of themselves.   They are great at uploading their photos and videos into drop box- eliminating the need to physically connect the ipad to the computer.

I enjoyed playing with the exposure when taking photographs.  It would be great to have a couple of students in the class become experts in the ipad camera.  They could then be the ‘go to’ people for the rest of the class.

Editing videos is another great skill for my camera experts to learn. I have edited videos on my iphone before but had not thought about doing it with videos on the ipad.  At this stage we are only able to download free apps onto the ipads, and I have not been able to find a great video editing app.  It is good to know that my students can edit parts of their videos without using imovie.  

Module 1

I am a member of gen y and love teaching with technology.  I have just (last week) finished my first year of teaching. I personally have an iphone and an ipad.  In my classroom we share 3 ipads with year 6.  We also share a variety of laptops, netbooks, macbooks and flip cameras.  As realistically a class of 30 students cannot share 3 iPads I need to be creative in how I teach and organise the class. 

ibooks

I love the ibooks app.  I enjoy reading books on my ipad, I also have the kindle and kobo ereading apps on my ipad.  What I most enjoy about the ibooks app is its flexibility.  You can change the font size and type and the background .  It is easy to search make notes and flip through pages.

 

Through this module I learnt how to create collections.  This could be beneficial for creating libraries for different KLAs.

The beauty of the ibooks app is that you can download pdfs.  I can save instructions as pdfs and get my students to follow them on the ipads.  For example if I can list the activities for my students to do on the ipad during reading groups, save it as a pdf and open it in ibooks.

A great (and free) ibook to check out is Hot apps 4 HOTS- a guide to using free apps to support higher order thinking skills.

Camera

The camera is so easy to use.  My students use it all the time for taking photos of their work, recording themselves and others speaking, creating tutorials and taking screen shots of their work.  They then upload their photos and videos to drop box so we can access it anywhere. 

A great (and free) app for creating a photo collage is photomess.  You can import photos from your ipad and rotate, crop and edit them into a collage.  This then saves as a photo which you can use anywhere.  For example I create a photo collage from individual photo of the 30 students in my class to use as a background on our google site.