Showing posts with label iPod. Show all posts
Showing posts with label iPod. Show all posts

Saturday, 6 June 2015

20 Apps for a Primary School iPad Device

We've written many posts about apps. Mostly, lists of apps we've come across, but also some of the possible uses for them. Yesterday, Liam presented in London about the use of iPad devices in the classroom. As part of that presentation, he gave his top twenty apps that he uses to support learning in his classroom. 



Of course this list is open to discussion, it doesn't explain uses for them and there's an app for just about everything (or at least it feels that way). If you'd like to take a look at the slides used in the presentation, they can be found here. 

In response to our post:
 
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Sunday, 2 December 2012

Ringtones Real Life Link

As part of our ICT curriculum, we use GarageBand to create music. Using the application children can import pre-recorded music loops or record their own voice or sound effects. After familiarising themselves with the software, their end of unit outcome is to produce a mobile phone ringtone. Audacity can also be used for the same purpose. GarageBand comes 'free' with a Mac computer and Audacity can be downloaded free for a Windows computer.


What to do:
- The children create a piece of music less than 40 seconds long.
- They export it to the computer as a .mp3 file.
- Finally, using Bluetooth they send it to a mobile phone to be used as a ringtone.

The children bring in a mobile phone, often a parent or sibling's old one to send their ringtone to during their lesson. Then we also hold an after school event when children invite their parents in to do the same, but with the child teaching them. 

Some example of our children's work can be found here.

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Thursday, 19 July 2012

Apps for Your Primary Classroom

The below list of iOS Apps was originally stored at http://web.me.com/thisisliam. These apps have all been used by us in our Key Stage Two classroom. Although this list links to the iTunes Store many of these apps are also available on other operating systems too:
Image credit: www.apple.com

Art

Geography

History

Literacy

Maths 

Basic Math

MFL

Music

Other 

Photography

Puzzles

Science

SEN 

We'd welcome your additions. Add them as comments below and to our previous post about apps. Since this post, we've blogged about more apps here.

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Sunday, 1 January 2012

QR Codes and TinyURL in Education


We started using QR Codes in our classrooms in the summer of 2011. We began investigating how we could make use of them and found a large amount of information online about the potential for QR Codes being used in the education environment. Some of these can be found here:




In addition to these websites there is also much more that can be found on YouTube, in blogs and by searching for 'QR Codes Classroom'.

Initially, we only made use of QR Codes and made them using Kaywa. This was good as it allowed easier access to a URL through either an application on a mobile device or a desktop QR Code reader. This worked in most cases, but we found that sometimes children struggled to manipulate the QR Code for the reader to pick it up easily and that children and parents didn’t always have access to a QR Code reader at home. 

We then, after seeing them used on Twitter, started to look at the use of URL shortening services. We have found www.tinyurl.com to be the most child friendly. Some others (www.bit.ly and www.awe.sm for example) are case sensitive, where as TinyURL is not case sensitive. So, we now provide links to websites as both QR Codes and as TinyURLs.
As a result of using TinyURL we also discovered that if the TinyURL is used to create the QR Code rather than the original URL it makes the QR Code much simpler and therefore easier to read. The two QR Codes below link to the same webpage, but one is much simpler than the other:

So, when creating your QR Codes to link to a URL pop the URL into a shortening service and use that URL to create your QR Code.

Finally, we initially used Kaywa to create our QR Codes in black and white, but have recently discovered www.unitag.fr which allows you to do this:



We hope that adds a little more to the QR Code discussion and is of use to you.
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Friday, 23 September 2011

App Sharing

Apps are awesome. I have so many apps on my phone that I have not played with half of them. Photgraphy apps, which make my naff pics into amazing art, truly addictive games and, of course, educational apps from tracking stars to making books into mini-blockbusters. The problem is which ones to get for our iPods at school?

We were introduced to the fantastic site AppShopper which tracks price changes as well as new apps. This is great but means we are getting even more of a range of apps to look at. We decided that we would like to use this blog to help suggest apps that would be good to use in school.

Therefore, we need you.

Please use the comments section to offer your ideas for great apps which we can use to make our lessons even more funky.

Thanks in advance.
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