My ICT Journey

This is a great work flow for schools with Google Aps for Education and shared iPads. Students who save their projects into Google Drive can access them from any ipad in the school or even from home.

Explain Everything and Google Drive from Lois Smethurst on Vimeo.

I’ve created a lesson plan in Skype in the Classroom to find classrooms who are willing to collaborate by being “interviewed” by students in my school who are creating content for their radio scripts. So far I’ve had one successful contact with a school in New Zealand but I’m hoping for more.

Time zones and mismatched holidays make it difficult to collaborate in real time so I’m thinking that I might try some asynchronous interviews using a tool like VoiceThread. This is still in the planning phase so stayed tuned for updates.

Last year I bought a set of ipads with some extra money that was allocated to the ICT budget. I was able to buy 10 ipads that would be used by students in my LEEP program (Lodgers Elearning Extension Program) and shared with other grades. At that stage I didn’t have money to purchase apps but thought I would experiment with just using free apps for the rest of the year.

This gave us an opportunity to see how the ipad could be used to enhance, transform and improve the opportunities for learning by students. It was also an opportunity to explore the type of apps that we found most useful. The ipads in our school are shared with students in grades one – five so the apps are varied in levels  but focus on students using them to make and create as much as possible.

The screens shots below show:

• the Home screen with some of the most important/useful apps (eg Tiny Tap, Google Drive)
• the folders which are organised according to use or subject (eg apps to Present or for Maths)
• what is inside each folder – the free apps that we will use this year.

We will be adding some paid apps once we have our Volume Purchase Program is in place.

If you think I’ve missed something that could be added to the free apps please let me know in the comments below.