Reflections of an iPad classroom 12/12/13

 This past week or so we have been dabbling in lots of different things. Form 1 who are absolute beginners at Spanish thoroughly enjoyed creating cartoon dialogues using the Puppet Pals app to practise their oral questions and answers. They only had 30 mins so I bribed them (I prefer to call it focusing) that whoever created and uploaded their video to Edmodo would get positive behaviour points on Lesson Monitor. Intense activity followed. What pleases me most is the intuitive nature of all this, as they selected, saved, published, uploaded, etc.. Only one couple struggled and were aided by another who had finished. 

Form 4 used Voice Record Pro to record their oral answers and uploaded them to Edmodo so I could check pronunciation. 

Lower 6 used Kidblog as part of their target setting, incorporating their marginal learning gains wheel into the blogpost. Today, they used the Educreations app in conjunction with Apple TV as we moved round the class, each pupil displaying their translation for a specific sentence and the rest offering feedback re grammatical accuracy. It was amazing to watch as each iPad took control of Apple TV and then sentences were corrected as we contributed feedback. 

Finally, our student and past pupil Megan created our first Aura using augmented reality app Aurasma. We videoed some Form 1 pupils talking about Spanish in Grosvenor then snapped their photo. Megan assures me it is easy to create the marvel that is the talking photo we ended up with, so tomorrow I become the pupil and my past pupil becomes the teacher! 

Reflections of an iPad classroom 3/12/13

Today was a spur of the moment iPad lesson with my AS Spanish class which proved very beneficial and produced the comment "Miss, you've made me love iPads" from a former paper-and-pencil declaree. 

I wanted to conclude the topic of technology by looking at the advantages and disadvantages of the internet, social networks and mobile phones. I set up 3 separate Linoit pages, posting the link each time onto the Lower 6 class page on Edmodo. The pupils each had an iPad and jumped on to the sites, posting advantages on yellow post-its and disadvantages on red post-its. They moved between the three separate pages. I took screen shots of the pages and dropped them into a PowerPoint which I then uploaded onto Edmodo; some pupils are happy with the Linoit links whereas others will want to print the PowerPoint off. 

We then took a past paper essay with its 3 bullet points. Again, I set up three Linoit pages and put the links on Edmodo. They typed up ideas for each bullet point and we then went through the points, correcting the grammar as we went (they told me the mistakes and/or how to fix them) Again the pupils were fully engaged, the level of the language was high and there were many more contributions than if we had planned at the board as a class. I am moving the class from high dependency for essay planning towards the ultimate goal of planning the essay themselves under pressure during the exam. This was an excellent halfway step and the pupils felt it really helped them. 

This lesson required no preparation in advance and yet it was one of the best lessons we have had this year in AS Spanish. The pupils were fully engaged and the quality of ideas and language was much better than in previous essay planning lessons. 

Reflections of an iPad classroom 2/12/13

Today Lower 6 and Form 5 used the teacher app for Socrative to create quizzes. They logged in using our Spanish departmental email and password and created their quizzes on the Present tense for L6 and Leisure for Form 5. We created a list of sub-topics for each and pupils signed up on the board for which one they wanted to do. They saved their quiz with the subtopic name plus #5 or #L6 followed by the number of their iPad (they always use the same one)
We then used some of the quizzes with the pupils using the student app for Socrative this time. I ran teacher-paced quizzes, student-paced quizzes and the extremely popular Space Race.
This was a great way of getting the pupils to look at their learning by creating questions and then showing their knowledge in the quiz stage.