Bring on the iPads

I have the most amazing fortune to have been given 18 iPads to trial in our school, to see how they can aid pupil learning and how I can embed them into the teaching and learning in my classroom. 

With this in mind, I have been thinking about activities which I will use. Obviously it will be a steep learning curve but I will try to blog about both the ups and the downs as I go. 

Here are my initial activities I have prepared with apps I was already familiar with, Make Dice Lite, Decide Now! and Flashcards. 

With Make Dice Lite, you choose the dice colour and add the content to each side. I already had made some for pronouns and for verbs, which I roll together so that the pupils must conjugate the verb in the selected part. Another idea has been to make a dice on the topic of Holidays, for example, and pupils must work in groups to write me a list of 15 accurately spelt words on the selected subtopic (weather transport, countries, etc) as a starter activity. The picture above is a starter for GCSE or AS, whereby pupils work in pairs, one speaker and one listener for the selected side eg 30 seconds talking about One Direction. Ideally, the listener will have a checklist to improve the quality of the spontaneous speech. 

The Decide Now app is great and very easy to create. Again you can use it for a starter for written revision or a speaking activity. I have wheels for lots of different topics including the one above where pupils will need to name two teachers who teach that subject. The idea here is to use it at the start of the school topic, to show the pupils how many cognates there are in this subject, before we meet them formally. 

This is a list of idiomatic phrases using parts of the body in Spanish which I got from the websitehttp://blogs.transparent.com/spanish/10-body-idioms-in-spanish/ I made Flashcards using the app of the same name, with the Spanish idiom and an exemplar phrase in one side and the English translation on the other side. 

Right, off to check out some more stuff, will blog again ASAP.