Apps in Primary school

Even I couldn't assist to the last session of this subject, I have been very interested in the sessions focused on the Ipads because it is a topic that our school does not work very hard at the moment.

Having Ipads in the classroom is a wide chance of resources where learning is integrated and the process of teaching and learning becomes more effective. 

As I said before, I do not work with ipads at the moment in the classroom but there were some special situations during the year where students have had the opportunity to use the ipad for final projects. 

One of these situations was the second trip of our project Erasmus +. Every year, students have the opportunity to visit a partnerschool in a different country and spend a week with native English speakers sharing culture and language besides adventures and experiences. 

When we were back from the trip, students wanted to show to the rest of the students what they visited, what they learnt, their new friends, the place where they stayed... 

Imovie was an amazing tool because students could create their own project and share it with everybody via several platforms. 

The main idea was to choose what they wanted to share, organize it, illustrate it, design, write... and Imovie was an appropriate resource for our aims. 

  

Certainly, fhe fact of using Imovie was the right choice because it was easy for the students to understand how it works, to use it and to achieve the aims teachers decided.

Regarding to Bloom's Taxonomy, this activity is related to Higher order thinking skills (HOTS) where students have to analyse, evaluate and create a final outcome taking into consideration their own experience and their feelings. The fact to show the final product to the rest of class and to their families and friends, made the project interesting and motivating. 

On the other hand, I would like to consider iDoceo as a very useful tool for teachers. 

Instead of carrying a notebook, iDoceo makes it easy to assess pupils and have access to a register of all the notes, labels and marks. Apart, iDoceo has different options with different purposes useful for teachers as summary (look for students, personal details, diary annotations, notes, comments, resources...), gradebook (assessment), a diary, notes, a setting plan and a pinboard. 

                   

I have been using iDoceo this year and I have seen a big change. The fact that I like the most is that children can help me during the assessment because they love iPads and they love using them.

Our Kandinsky Story

My name is Mireia Cuxart and I’m presenting you an activity that I applied in my class related to the ICT class.

The activity is planned for a 4 years old class with 100% English immersion program during Infant Education. Kandinsky is one of the painters for the Arts and Crafts sessions where the students don’t have any previous knowledge. For this reason, the objectives are to have the chance to observe an abstract author and visualize his art. Moreover, students will describe the piece of art that they want in one word and take a picture to place it in the iMovie app in order to create the story.  For these three activities, students will be discovering art on their own and taking pictures individually. Afterwards, as a group activity, they will create the story with the words chosen for each picture and place it in iMovie individually. As you can see, students will be aware of cultural arts as well as using their oral and ICT skills to participate during the activity. It is appropriate to use ICT resources because it is a way to introduce little students to new technology that are useful in class. It is something you can use in your daily life to create new projects and use different materials for the topic that are planned for the year. ICT resources contribute in letting them use new skills that they won’t use without new devices like iPads.

Like in every lesson plan, you need to know that there are some problems that may happen during the session. The ones that I think are more typical are classroom management problems; in this case iPads can be very useful but also really distracting for the students and for the same reason, a guide access is done with the students so they can only use their cameras to do the activity. Regarding the assessment for this unit, the final result will be the most important part for the activity. As the kids will be taking pictures with their own devices and creating the story with the iMovie, the final project presented to the parents will be useful to see if the kids did participate on the sessions and were able to make a reasonable sentence as their collaboration for the story. Parents will need to give their own opinion for the Open Door’s Day so the students can have a feedback on their work.