Enhancing Learning with iPads
Starting in January, I will be working with teams of educators to assess how we can best use iPads in helping students learn. This is the result of a competitive process in which teacher teams submitted proposals to get sets of iPads. I was particularly involved in developing two proposals and am pleased that the assessors placed them as the two best proposals. Second semester will be an exciting time of experimentation, innovation and evaluation. Fortunately, I will also benefit from a full day of iPad professional development at the 21st Century Learning Conference in Hong Kong. To help me keep up with new iPad developments, I've created a second curated newspaper using scoop.it. My secondary aim is to learn how to use scoop.it and compare it with paper.li. Click on iPad Learning for Wee Kids for my iPad News.
One of the projects I will be supporting is with five year olds (called Pre-Primary in this school) in three English-speaking and three German-speaking classes. They will start a unit called Day and Night and this unit will lead to a PYP Exhibition (yes, they do have them at this age in special circumstances). I am hoping to see a lot of innovation here, though we will obviously keep an appropriate balance. Children at this age need to also run around, play, pretend, draw with crayons, play with water and sand...you get the picture. But, we'd like to try out a sky app during a visit to Labrador Park in the evening, with the app helping us identify what we see in the sky. We'd like to use the camera and the microphone to record their learning journey. We'd like to use some specific apps that would give students a wider range of perspectives on the solar system, the Earth's rotation and the seasons to help students learn faster and deeper.
Literacy and Numeracy
Another project I will be supporting is with three classes. Most of the students are aged 6 years old, but one class is a two year programme that includees 5 year olds. The focus of this proposal is squarely on developing basic literacy and numeracy skills. From sight words to basic computational skills, we hope the iPads will contribute to supporting students who exhibit a wide range of abilities, including those learning English as a second or third language. Our math programme already relies on considerable technology, but it lacks the mobility and ease of use that students at this age desire/require. Students will create stories, listen to and read stories, and illustrate stories. They will learn sight words and number bonds. They will record how they do these things and show their achievements to an appreciative audience.
Knowing me, Knowing you
The final of the three projects I will be supporting is focussed on a unit relating to emotions, feelings and relationships. The plan is to integrate the iPads in a cross-curricular way. As it relates to the unit of inquiry, students will have the opportunity to record themselves interacting with other students, document efforts to create social conventions, and to explore how different emotions can be represented facially (there is an Art link here). As these are young readers and writers, there will be important opportunities to read, to record themselves reading aloud (and reflecting on their performance), and to re-tell a story. Mathematically, students will work with various apps to improve their math knowledge; they will also record (still photos or video) different computational methods.