iPlayground: iPads for Young Learners

I am fortunate enough to go to TCEA this year and do a few presentations and workshops with my friend and colleague, Lisa Johnson. While we are here doing our own presentations and workshops, we are attending as many presentations as we can.

Carol Finley and  Ruth Jungman presented “iPads for Young Learners” at the iPlayground. They highlighed apps and how they can be used in the PreK-1st grade classrooms.

The first idea they shared was to use ABC Magnetic Lite (uppercase letters only) or the paid version of ABC Magnetic Alphabet (includes upper and lower case, numbers, symbols and some pictures) with small groups to do “Making Big Words”. With this activity you have the students make a word, such as CAT. Then say, “Change one letter to change cat to rat”. Students then exchange the C for and R. This goes on for a while then it would go to something harder. “Change one letter to change rat to run”. Students exchange the A to a U. They showed a video of students working with their teacher in a small group on this activity. This is an excellent way to use this app in the classroom and Ruth and Carol really stressed in their presentation that it is really not so much the app itself, but rather how teachers use it with students in an academic way.

They went on to talk about ABC Tracer (check out the free version for a sample). This app demonstrates how to properly write each letter of the alphabet in both upper case and lower case as well as numbers. It models how to begin at the top of the letter and work down. Then it given the learner an opportunity to create the letter themselves by tracing over dotted lines. If the child starts the letter at the bottom it gives a red line instead of a green one and it gives a little squeaky noise to reinforce that it is being done improperly. They suggest doing this app at a station.

Carol said that at the beginning of the year she allowed the students to do free play with Doodle Buddy. Soon she thought, “But what is the purpose?” She began to see ways she could use the app in academic ways. Such as having the students practice their letter writing and having them use the stamps to associate words that begin with that letter. Or using same concept with a color, for example the student writes green then finds pictures of items that are green to stamp on the screen. They discussed how writing with a pencil is a much harder skill than with the finger and that students need to get the feel of the letters with their fingers first and then the writing is much easier with a pencil. And of course, it is much more enticing to do it on the iPad for practice.

One way to get the student to have more choice that Carol has found is with Sock Puppets. With this app Carol has students make scripts about their 8 key character education program. Students took one key to do a script for and then act out a scene that with the puppets. There is choice built in with the app as the students choose their characters, background scenery and props. Given that the students work in pairs, they are inherently collaborating on their project. They talked about the various ways they use the app specifically sequencing and story telling. The students feel there is real purpose to their stories because they share their stories and feel like they are teaching others through their stories. In addition to the 8 key character education program videos the children have also done little spelling activities such as spelling out a word and singing a little song “R-E-D, I can spell red”. The children then evaluate their final videos to decide if they ware worthy of being published or if they need to redo the video or perhaps even rework their story and or script. Carol shares the videos on her teacher web page.

Flip It and Flip It Lite are animation apps that Carol and Ruth say they used at free center time for the most part at the beginning of having the pads. Soon enough they began to see the educational value in the app. They have used this app for students to illustrate the life cycle of a frog, a plant growing from a seed, a person kicking a ball or jumping rope. The animation is quite basic, but it requires that the artist really imagine what the next step of the sequence will be, how the body needs to be placed or what should be erased or added. There is no voice over option and you cannot send the animation from the app anywhere.

Carol then discussed a few management techniques such as having the iPad set to a blank page with only one or two apps in a folder that the students are allowed to use for that center time. She says that it took a bit of time to train the students not to go to other pages or to search for other apps but it is worth the front-loading. She uses a lot of screen shots for evaluation. The students also turn in the iPad for some assignments that a screen shot does not work for.

My favorite anecdote she shared was that she has students who often share out what they created on the iPads during show and tell. How ADROABLE is that?

She ended by giving us some apps that she loves in more of a list format:

Clifford

My Word Wall

Splashtop whiteboard

Teach Me Kindergarten

Word Magic

MeeGenius

Stinky Socks

Story Chime books (there are a variety of titles)

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4 thoughts on “iPlayground: iPads for Young Learners

  1. Thank you for sharing your learning from this presentation. I am looking for ilessons for preschoolers, so I really appreciate this. Doodle Buddy is one of my favorite apps. I have started to blog about some of the applications for early childhood lessons (http://eiplayground.blogspot.com/). Love getting new ideas. Thanks again.

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