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.

I’m going to mention just four of the multitude of apps out there for photo editing. These are the apps I use the most, and together enable a great deal of flexibility and creativity in editing and improving photos. Used alongside the camera connection kit or the PhotoSync or Web Albums apps mentioned in a previous post, you can edit pictures taken from your iPhone or from camera SD cards.

The four apps I am recommending are SnapSeed, PhotoFx Ultra, PhotoGene and Filterstorm.

SnapSeed

You can get great results with this one. Especially effective for landscapes and buildings, but can be used on all shots to get some interesting and professional looking effects.

PhotoFX Ultra

This is another professional looking app which gives great quality effects. A selection of filters and effects can be applied, and all can be tweaked to exact requirements. There is also a nice paint brush option where effects can be applied selectively and the ability to clone within pictures is also included.

PhotoGene

A good one for easy quick basic edits such as cropping and rotation, but also great for brightness, contrast, saturation etc type adjustments, and for adding text to pictures.

Filterstorm

Another app offering extremely flexible editing with adjustment available on all filters and effects applied. This app has a big brother which is a little more expensive, but can handle batch editing if you need to be able to edit multiple photos.

Between these apps I have found that your iOS device can become a capable photo editor. If had to buy just two of these, it would be PhotoFX Ultra (extremely flexible and powerful) and Snapseed (stunning effects, especially with the Drama filter)

The iPad is a great device for producing work using images – Comic strips, movies, collages etc. A simple, effective way of sharing images with sets of iPads is vital.

Web Albums

This app utilises a Picasa photos account (or multiple accounts) for sharing images. Any albums on your Google Picasa Web Albums account are available from within the app – it’s straightforward and simple. This enables you to upload pictures from anywhere and they will be available on all iPads / iPods Touches. You can also upload pictures from within the app – so children could collaborate on building an album of pictures for a particular topic.

Photo Sync

This a fantastic app for sharing pictures between iOS devices or between an iOS device and desktop computer. Select the pictures you want to share and choose where you want to send them. Simple, and it works nicely. This is particularly good for the odd picture that you want to send from one iOS device to another or from a desktop to one iOS device.

Photo Sync can also be used to upload pictures to online photo albums such as Picasa and Flickr. To use with a desktop, you need to download the (free) client software.

Some are more general and can be used for maths with the teacher’s and children’s creativity.

MathBoard

This is a great way for children to practice the method they prefer for written addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. A big range of options in terms of the difficulty of the calculations and a full chalkboard style screen for the children to use a written method to calculate the answer before entering the answer.

Motion Math

Fractions – a surprisingly engaging yet simple game in which children tilt the iPad to guide fractions to their appropriate place on a number line. great for concept of value of fractions.

Mathemagics

One for investigation – an explanation of lots of ‘tricks’ for working out certain types of calculation quickly. Opportunity to investigate why they work or if children can think of their own.

Math Bingo

Another one for quick practice of maths facts – addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Chalkboard

The one thing that wastes the most time in my maths lessons is whiteboard pens. Run out, not enough to go round, lost lids! This app is one of many that can be used a simple whiteboard (or chalkboard in this case).

Show Me

This app has lots of uses but can certainly be used in maths lessons. The idea is that a whiteboard screen is used to write / draw with coloured pens and the internal mic on ipad is used to record an explanation of what is being drawn. The video files are then shared on the showme website and can be linked to from class blog.

Teachers could use this to help explain homework, but perhaps even better, children can create their own explanation videos when they have learnt a new concept, or come up with questions for classmates – lots of potential.

GarageBand

Create your own music, either by playing the virtual instruments, using the help of ‘Smart’ instruments which play preset patterns for you in the chords you choose, or by recording live instruments or voice.

You can even crate samples using the built in mic which you can then play using the virtual keyboard. Record up to 8 tracks in every song you create, before sharing via email or sending to iTunes. A Posterous blog is a great way to share content such as movies and audio as it will embed many different file types just by sending them to blog via e-mail. This is very handy for iPads.

iMovie

iMovie is a cut down version of the full Mac product, but again, is ideal for use in the classroom. children cause shared images and videos, or find pictures online to build into a movie which supports their work. This could be used for almost any written work opportunity, as children can then record their ‘script’ over the movie they have created. Background music can also be added – there are some preset loops or anything in the iTunes library can be used (take care with copyright issues).

Once Local Authorities have become less paranoid about YouTube (hopefully yours already has) children will then be able to broadcast their creations online and share them with parents / friends / rest of world. Movies can then be embedded in class blogs / school website.

Safari

The included browser, Safari is great for browsing and children will use it’s features such as zooming and saving pictures naturally. The lack of flash is a minor issue, but there is still so much potential for children researching and exploring online. The speed is good and this seems like a good time to point out the benefits of the reliability of iPod / iPad apps, and the devices wi-fi. Crashes are very rare in my experience of iPod touch and iPhone, and the iPad is proving equally reliable. When you are planning on having 30 devices in the room, this is a big factor!

E-mail

It’s another of the basics, but the email app is clean and efficient, and could be a good way of sharing a document or image with a group of children. I would set up one class email address and one individual machine address on each iPad. With third party office apps installed, documents that require editing could be opened with them.

Twitterific

Twitter is a great tool for quick, easy publishing of short ideas, reviews, thoughts etc online. Combined with a Twitter widget on your website, it means that videos, pictures and text can be easily added to your site, keeping pages up to date and relevant. Children could post a summary of what they have learnt today, or a book review. It isn’t necessary or important that people follow the account, as the tweets are displayed on the widget on the school website. Class, year group and whole school accounts can be created.

DropBox

A class DropBox account would be a great way to share files across all iPads. Files are uploaded from any machine, and once the app has been installed on all iPads and they have been signed into the class account, all machines will have access to the files. They can be organized in folders, and again, office files can be opened in Documents to Go or other ‘Office’ type apps. This could be a way of sharing template documents which children can then open, edit and email back to the teacher.

Documents to Go

Documents to Go is a mobile Office app, which enables creation and editing of doc, xls and ppt files. Linking to DropBox and Google Docs is possible, so that any documents stored using these services can be accessed and edited. In the classroom, this means that the teacher can prepare and save a document for the class to access and work on. Children can also create documents themselves, although I prefer ‘Pages’ for word processing. Numbers and Keynote for iPad are yet to be explored!

Reel Director

Wow. This is a stunning app. Even more flexible than iMovie for iPhone 4, this app will enable the creation of movie projects using pictures and movies saved in the Photos app. Music can be uploaded to the iPad from a PC or Mac using the built in http server and used as a backing track. Voice over for the movie can be recorded directly within the app. Transitions and Ken Burns effects are available, as well as fading options for audio. Classy looking titles can be added to any image or video clip. Video projects can then be exported and emailed or uploaded directly to YouTube. The possibilities for using this across the curriculum are endless – here I was thinking how a rivers topic could make use of screen captures using Google Earth, a narrated journey, following a river from source to mouth.

Strip Designer

This app enables the creation of comic strip style pages, using images saved in the Photos app. There are lots of templates to chose from, and once inserted, the images can be zoomed and rotated as required.

Callouts can be added and manipulated, meaning children can create high quality comic strip images. This could be a great tool for vocabulary and sentence level work in literacy, and for exploring and empathising with characters in other subjects.

Art Studio

There are lots of Art apps around, but Art Studio seems like a nice balance between functionality and usability. Certainly a program primary aged children could use to create digital art, with simple tools but lots of possibility for deeper customisation of tools.

Art apps are a great way of exploring tone and shade, as well as experimenting with blending. Could be used in combination with Reel Director or Strip Design.

Photo FX Ultra

Lots of high quality photo effects and filters, cropping and rotating of images. Good for any pictures grabbed or saved from the web that need some editing, or for creating a particular effect (sepia for a WW2 movie) from photos imported from Web Albums.

Pages

Pages is the word processing app available for the iPad. It is a fantastic app, a simplified word processor with limitations but for classroom use it is great. Typing on the iPad keyboard is surprisingly fast and responsive, especially easy in landscape mode. Basic formatting is available, but the most impressive tool is the image inserting – a choice of photos, tables charts and shapes, all of which can be manipulated freely and easily using multi-touch. This app is ideal for quick instinctive document creation in the classroom, with good default text wrapping, and the option to insert text boxes for free text positioning.

Web Albums

Syncing pictures to every iPad would be a clumsy way of giving children a set of shared images to use for a lesson. An online gallery is much more efficient, and Picasa albums is my personal favourite (partly because of the obvious integration with the free Picasa software). Once signed in to a shared Picasa web albums account, this app enables the teacher to share a group of pictures with the class for use in a project. It’s also presented very nicely, in an informal photo album style.

WordPress

The WordPress app gives a clean, simple method off publishing to a class or school WordPress or Primary Blogger account. A class blog is a great way for children to publish writing online, giving an audience for their work, and with a set of iPads, the class could be simultaneously publishing their own reports, stories, recounts, explanations, book reviews, etc to the class blog.

Music Studio

If you are at all familiar with Garage Band on Mac, or probably any basic multitrack music composition software, this is an unbelievably powerful app for £8! Recording up to 16 separate software tracks, with a variety of instruments to choose from is the start – then for the gifted and talented, there are effects, panning, quantising – features you would generally associated with desktop software. When done you can export to wav and transfer to a desktop, or transfer the midi file for further editing. At its most basic this would provide a way for younger children to experiment with very simple two track recording of a simple melody, but will also cater for up to full 16 track composition. Compose a ringtone? A soundtrack for a short animation? An advert jingle?

FourTrack

If you’d Ike your children to experiment with recording real instruments, voices, or create soundscapes, then FourTrack (which is actually an iPhone app so has to be enlarged on iPad) is great. As the title suggests it is a four track recorder, using the iPad’s microphone as an input. The mic is actually pretty good quality, so pleasing results can be achieved. Perhaps recording a drum rhythm on track one, then add a drone and an improvised melody. Or perhaps recording the sound of a playground on one track, to be overlaid with poetry? Lots of potential.

TweetMic

This is another iPhone app at present, so you’ll want to use the x2 magnification on iPad. It’s just a very easy way for children to publish audio recordings online using a Twitter account, and perhaps a widget on the school website. It really is as simple as pressing the big red button, recording your poem, review, speech, short story, advert etc and clicking on publish. That’s it.

Books

Text looks good in the books app, and it is so easy to use. Pages turn very nicely and it’s very straightforward to change text size go to a particular page, search for words even highlight text and add notes. PDF files can also be added to your bookshelf and read in the Books app. This app would be great in guided reading sessions, children being able to highlight appropriate passages and add their thoughts and notes. Also could be a great way to increase the a tock of books, as one purchased book can be synced with all iPads. Not lots of choice at the moment, but hopefully that will increase quickly.

Marvel Comics

More motivational reading for children who have become apathetic towards reading for pleasure. The sample comics I have looked at have some pretty good (all be it short) sections of text, accompanied by brilliant artwork which might engage children with reading in a new way. I haven’t experimented with purchasing comics and downloading them on multiple devices yet – hopefully this will be possible. This app links well with Strip Design – children can see how the professional do it before they embark on a new comic stir project.

Interactive Books

There are a number available at the moment and I’m sure that will increase as these are a great way to enthuse and engage younger readers. This Toy Story book has painting, games, songs and a record function so children can record themselves telling the story for their friends to listen to. Again, beautifully presented and animated, as you’d expect from Disney!

ABC Phonics

There are a lot of ‘educational’ apps available on the app store, some better than others. I’ve just picked a couple here which I think have some value. This app speaks letter sounds clearly, with correct UK English phonic pronunciation. It shows letters being formed, and then the child has to trace the letter shape accurately. A simple app, but clean and effective in achieving its objective.

MathBoard

A good old fashioned blackboard with calculations! For practicing written methods, this is great. You can set the type of calculation you want to do, how many calculations and if you want a time limit, or timing. The calculation is displayed with 4 multiple choice answers. The child can write the calculation down then expand the area for working out, giving them a whole page to carry out the calculation. In some ways no different from carrying out calculations in a book, but I know how I’d rather do a set of practice calculations, and the children seem to find this much more appealing and motivating.

I think they would be a great classroom tool. We’ll see!

http://www.molescroftprimary.net/learningplatform.htm

Molescroft E-Safety Policy

E-safety scheme

Any other ideas?