Our school is heavily invested in the movement of Thinking Skills. We have just been accredited as the first school in South Africa by the University of Exeter. It's kind of amazing. I really like it. It allows me to do cool things and I am constantly pulling out the "but it's for thinking skills" card.
But really, it such a cool way of teaching and I am incredibly grateful that I was able to take this on so early in my career. As part of making it authentic in in our school environment I held a photo competition. It was called LOOK UP. We wanted the girls to look at our school from a different perspective and to start looking up and noticing their surroundings. I launched it at THIS ASSEMBLY (still have no clue how I made it link, but I did, woo!)
We encouraged them to use iPads or iPhones, mostly for the use of filters and emailing purposes. We didn't limit the amount of filters they could use. You can see that many took the filter thing too far. Unfortunately filtering is a life skill you have to figure out for yourself. Some never will.
^^ Montage of the entrants
We were blown away by some of the entrants. You must remember this is primary school level and our 3rd place winner is 8 years old!
^^ 1st ^^2nd ^^3rd
Tons of fun. Super easy to execute. A nice school spirit building activity. Happy apping! (we back on the happy again)
It is so darn frustrating when working with little people who don't have emails. Getting stuff off iPads can be draining and when you use apps that aren't exactly educational and are really more "social", well thats when all the feels come out, quietly, hiding behind your laptop screen, hoping little ears don't hear/see the many choice curse words directed towards technology in general. Alas, we forge on. Hoping for the best, never being mentally prepared for the worst. Apping (no happy today)
This lesson has been a few years in the making. It was my very first "no wifi situation" lesson back in 2012. As you can gather, there was no wifi, we were learning about compound words and the foxgloves around my school were beautiful. Originally I asked the girls to photograph and research on Google all about the origin and name of foxgloves. However recently my school has become a Thinking School, and a part of this programme is making students more mindful when approaching their learning.
I started the lesson off with a question "What is a foxglove?" Only 1 girl knew the answer and I bribed her for her silence. I made them write their answers before we went outside.
After the observation I asked the next question "Why is it called a foxglove?" They then had to observe and deduct (Blooms) from what they saw and write an answer to the question.
We then went outside and took some photo's of the foxgloves as they would need these for their Explain Everything movie. We also went on google images to download some other photo's needed for the presentation (this should actually be a lesson on it's own: live and learn.) They used these photo's to create a Flow Map for the structure of their presentation.
^^ Nothing pleases an 8 year old more than seeing herself on a screen.
^^ Flow Map: We are still working on how these work.
As we had already used Explain Everything once before, I asked the girls to do this one completely on their own. Of course I did help when needed and they were required to put all their information they gathered in, but the layout and picture cropping, typing, spelling (no judgies hey!) record etc was all to be done on their own.
And I was proud.
We even started a mini theme table:
^^ Class circle map: Define in context all you now about Foxgloves.
*Extension activity
The next day, a few girls noticed the similarity between Jacarandas and Foxgloves. We then used a double bubble map to compare and contrast the similarities and differences. They had to draw on past knowledge (Habits of Mind) to complete this task.
^^ "Walk of silence" (never really that silent in my class)
^^ Comparing and contrasting with a double bubble map
All in all I would say this lesson improves every year. I like the fact that it changes with each group, I also like that the girls actually take some time to find these connections between language and their environment. If you don't have an abundance of foxgloves like we do you could always swop out for something like Iceberg rose bushes or Yellowwood tree. Some of the girls are even using the app at home and bringing their information creations to school for show 'n tell. Win. Happy apping!
Last week I had the pleasure of using iMovie for my assembly. I will sing it from the rooftops I LOVE THIS APP. Really, the options are limitless and it is actually easier to use it on an iPad than the Mac. Although not educational at all, they were delivered in an educational environment and so I will put it on here because as teachers we need aaaallll the ideas we can get.
^^ Bandana day promo
^^ My assembly on resilience
Play around with it, the possibilities are endless! Happy apping!
Time: 1 hour Level: Easy Would I do it again? Yes Another emergency lesson took place a few weeks back. For some reason I could not locate half the iPads. Ipads generally work better when they are not being shared. I only had half, so I needed a beneficial sharing lesson. I had seen a beautiful picture on Pinterest that I was very keen to try out with my girls for art, but with the MIA ipads and lack of lesson plan for the next hour I had to be a little more flexible. In Maths we have been learning about Symmetry. Using this picture as inspiration I gave them free range of the design they were to make. Using the building blocks and unifix blocks (not so pretty, but I like my job, I was not going to raid the gardens for the sake of a lesson: ok maybe I would. Rebel) the instructions were simple. Make a symmetrical pattern and take a photo from above.
Pinterest picture. Obviously mine looked nowhere as good.
Pro Tip: Explain how to take a picture from above. Apparently this is not something the millennials have been born with (I always assume they know everything digital). Multiple retakes were needed, and I mean multiple. I was really happy with most of the results, it was an excellent lesson on how to build symmetrical patterns, as most of my girls rushed into the activity with little thought and struggled to make their pattern symmetrical. The girls were chuffed. I was chuffed. We have no more ink in the printer. Happy apping!
So if you, like me, are tired of answering for the 7 millionth time in one hour the password for your firewall or what Safari is exactly, then this will hopefully be useful for you. I have made a little "help mat" for each of my girls that will hopefully, by the end of a couple more lessons, enable them to start sorting out each of their own issues. This is a life skill that they will need going forward in their lives and it is a life skill I need less of in mine.
I made this in word, so if you would like a copy pop me an email and I'll send it through to you which you can edit it to suit your needs. Happier apping!
Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of Apple. His and hers MacBooks, ipods, ipads, iphones, Apple TV, Apple stickers on our cars (ok not that bad). Let's just say that my life would be vastly different without Apple. But sometimes I feel that South Africa is not ready for such greatness. Our connectivity to everything causes endless woes in my life. My lack of understanding of certain apps makes me ugly cry in my stock room. My inability to think things through logically, because thats the way I am, frustrates me to no end. So when on Tuesday 11:00 rolled around and this ever enthusiastic and slightly over confident teacher announced to her class the "grand plan" and the "grand plan" didn't work. This is what happened:
Maybe it was a combination of many late nights due to play practice. Report stress. 8 year olds not listening for roughly 5 hours of of the 5 and a half that I have with them. But it got ugly. First, said App (that I will let you know all about soon) would not function. 25 girls standing around, looking like fools, whining, fighting, making me sad. So next plan. Mathletics. No internet connectivity. Next plan. Reading App: locked. Next plan: Einstein cubes: all levels completed, no reseting.
By now the patience that I dont really have anyway was now gone.
Lots of angry words.
Lots of hate towards ipads.
We then moved on to "sand art". Possibly the most un-educational App available to mankind.
I sat in my own self pity threatening the lives of any child and ipad that came near my desk. I eventually made the mature decision to let it go and not write an angry post before at least 24 hours had past by. Lets hope that this little episode has added to my ipad growth.
Time: 6 weeks Level: Hard Would I do it again: Yes, maybe, we will see
They got the name right on this one. You will explain everything, over and over and over. I literally invested half a terms worth of one hour lessons on this app, but it was totally worth it. We made a small tutorial on how to build a fire after our "camping" outing. It was quite a challenge to get this right and I would recommend practicing on the app and writing down step-by-step what it is you want to do. I did not do this. I paid heavily for my laziness. It's functionality is amazing and if you youtube some ideas you wont be disappointed. It took 6 ipad lessons to complete this task. Yes 6 weeks of painfully slowly instruction. Lets say if I was to enter survivor, I would be able to make a fire rather successfully. Cons : Incredibly slow to teach, many steps are required : Hard to teach to a large group because of each individuals pace : There were some major changes when we did an update. And of course not all ipads are updated equally, this caused immense frustration! : *This is the DVD / PVR generation. I had to teach them about recording over long enough so that it covered the previous work. This was harder than I thought it would be. (see pros) Pros : Once skills are learnt it will be easy to use the app again : *You can record the sound / voice over again and again until you are happy. : No internet needed! : The final product looks quiet amazing and so will you by association. These are really in all their raw glory. Please don't judge if you hear my teacher voice being bossy (it was hard work ok!)
I hope to be using this app a lot more in the future. I think I was slightly schooled by this one. But as they say, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Happy Apping!
Time: 1.5 hours Level: Medium Would I do it again? Yes Today's lesson was proudly brought to you by Neotel, and their amazing ability to be down at least twice a week, usually on a Tuesday, between 11-12 when I have booked out the ipads. This is how I usually react...
...but not today! Fortunately for me, this was not the end of a few plastic routers lives, as earlier that week at our learning area meeting the topic of going back to basics and focusing on the core concepts was asked to be properly reinforced for the remainder of the term. We have been learning about adjectives, verbs and nouns all year but I was struggling to get my girls (especially the weaker ones) to identify them in isolation. This I know to be true, seems to be a universal problem amongst foundation phase learners. At that exact moment I realized that the life of the ipad, sitting infront of me was about to be no more, the age old saying of "tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, involve me and I understand" popped into my head. And (under the circumstances) this idea became a somewhat meaningful lesson. My girls were simply asked to make an educational video, that they would show the Grade 1's to teach them about the Parts of Speech we had covered. I gave a little demonstration covering the basics: 1. How to hold the ipad steady. 2. How to not cut off heads in different shots. 3. What kind of backgrounds they were looking for. 4. To make sure the area they were in was quiet and had as little background noise as possible. Again, I did explain this, as you will see not all my helpful tips were taken seriously. They also had to: 1. Create a Flow Map on the sequence of events in the film (If you use Thinking Maps) 2. Be in groups of 4 3. Each have a turn to act and film 4. Delegate the tasks required to complete in iMovie (Working Interdependently if you use Habits of Mind) We used iMovie to string the clips together which is by far one of the easiest things to use on the Ipad (and free!) and I would say that it could be used right from Grade 1. We discussed what would be the best template to use and agreed that using the "simple" template would be best for an educational clip. The lesson took about an hour and a half. Considering this was the first time most of them had used iMovie before this was an excellent turn around time for such an informative lesson. But in the end they had loads of fun, it required very little prep from my side and the valuable skill of inserting, cropping and fading in clips were taught, as well as the reinforcement of the Parts of Speech. They all started to look a little something like this...
Give it a try, I think you will be surprised by the creativity and depth as to which they can go. A great way to "save the day" and can easily be applied across all grades in the foundation phase level.
The reality is that most South African teachers although enthusiastic lack the training, understanding or resources to support these incredibly beneficial machines. Let's be honest teacher friends, we have be given the responsibility of rolling out one of the biggest investments that many schools around South African have made (minor heart attack) and turning it into something accessible in a third world wifi reception zone!? (slightly bigger heart attack.) This is a blog where I attempt to share ideas, tricks and tips on how I didn't blow my top when the Syrex login password did not connect for the 5th time today. We are in this together, Simunye.
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