Week 8: Informal blog task - Different Apps for use in school

The 2014 National Curriculum (DfE, 2013) states that through computing children become digitally literate and they are able to express their own ideas through ICT at a suitable level in order to become active participants in a digital world. Following this, during this session we were introduced to a number of applications that are suitable for creating multimodal texts within the primary classroom.

The first app we were introduced to was Book Creator. This app allows children to create their own story books in a quick and simple way by adding text, images, video and audio recordings, with a further opportunity to ‘publish’ any books created to iBooks (Apple 2013).  Bearne (2009) discusses a number of scenarios of children creating multimodal texts in the classroom and discusses the benefits including the teaching of cross-curricular links between English and ICT and providing the children with control over how to display their books, showing an increase in motivation towards writing stories.

When we were first introduced to the idea of creating digital talking books I thought this would be a time consuming tasks, however it was seen in this seminar that digital books can be completed to a high standard in a short period of time and it was interesting to see the different approaches and ideas each groups took, thus showing the great opportunities this app can present for future practice. Due to the features of being able to input audio recordings and videos this app can be adapted for children who may find reading and writing difficult, they can record themselves telling their story, therefore turning their ideas into an audio book. A final point about this useful app is that because the app provides a blank canvas it can be adapted to any age or ability.

Another app that we looked at in this session was puppet pals. I was fortunate enough to attend an interactive boot camp with the university in Estonia during year 2; during this experience we used puppet pals in school with a group of children to explain different landforms. This app is particularly useful for children who may be uncomfortable being filmed as they do not need to be filmed and the audio recording they give can be warped to sound different. A positive of this app is that it is also suitable to use with a number of children as you can add a number of puppets to one project. From my own experience this app is easy to teach with and when used in school the children enjoyed this experience.

After this session I am looking forward to going into school next week and put into practice what we have been learning throughout the module so far, it will be interesting to see how the school uses ICT within learning as my SE3 school had iPads that were not used whilst I was there due to teachers not having experience using and teaching with them.

Apple inc (2013) Book Creator for iPad. [Online] available at: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/book-creator-for-ipad/id442378070?mt=8

Bearne, E. (2009) Multimodality literacy and texts: Developing a discourse. ‘Journal of Early Childhood Literacy’ 9 (2)

Department for Education (2013) National Curriculum in England: Computing programmes of study. London: HMSO