We’ve had our class set of iPads up and running for two weeks now; here are a few thoughts.
Firstly, so far, I am totally satisfied that this will be a great investment for the school. The children have taken to using the iPads very quickly and, although there are new techniques to learn, the intuitive nature of iOS has meant the learning curve has been steep but fast. We have had the iPads out on the desks virtually all the time over these first two weeks; not always being used, but ready to slide into action when needed. At the moment I am using them as much as possible – experimenting with possibilities and best use.
Some ways we’ve used the iPads so far:
Pages – We’ve used pages in the ways you might expect -
> Children creating simple word processing docs,
> Adding photos that they have saved to their camera roll or copied from the internet,
> Posting to class blog as PDF,
> Editing / improving work I’ve emailed to the iPads in literacy.
> Writing maths problems and emailing to friend’s iPad for them to solve
Penultimate
> Whiteboard replacement – save pages, no pen running out!
> E-mail notebook with pictures attached to pages for annotating
Mathboard / Times Tables / Math Bingo
> Practice of tables, division and written method techniques
iMovie
> Documentary creation using photos with voice over.
Moodboard
> Take photos of classmates and create branching database – Science
> Create food chain diagrams with photos / labels / arrows
Safari
> Research for science activities
> Image searching across all subjects
Mail
> Great way to distribute documents to class
> Children can send work to teacher
Web Albums
> Children access pictures I have saved there to avoid web searching – depending on objective
These are some of the ways we have used the iPads so far. Certainly having a Posterous blog has been a bonus as email is a great way to publish from the iPad. Children have been able to create documents and save as JPGs or PDFs or send movies to YouTube then post link to Posterous – a really easy way to build a class blog. I wonder now if each child should have their own blog to publish all iPad work to, otherwise the class blog could soon become unwieldy.
An email address per ipad is a must have, and a group address set up is great so you can send a mail to one address / group and it goes to every iPad. Individual addresses mean they can also communicate with each other when necessary.
