A really simple use of digital technology is as a means of bringing the outside environment back into the classroom.  Here, children collected images of mathematical shapes from around the school grounds and nearby.

This video is a Puppet Pals retelling of the Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen.   The children first mapped out and learned to tell the story.

They created artwork for the video and used the Puppet Pals app on the ipad to create the video, which was used as part of an assembly on storytelling.

The Ten Gems was a group writing exercise with 9 interational students aged 10-11, who by chance all came from different countries. The aim was to write a quest style story with 9 episodes, each taking place in the home country of one of the writers.  The students had to collaborate in planning the overall framework of the story to ensure that the storyline was consistent.  They also needed to share ideas for style features (such as a rhyme that emerged on the necklace giving instructions) so that these ran through each episode.

This is not strictly a digital story as it could equally have been written longhand but it would have been even easier to work on as a shared Word or Google document, as students could have seen each other’s episodes more easily.

The complete story is here: 

Following the QCA scheme of work on Fairgrounds, the children looked at examples of fairground rides to see which were moving parts.  They investigated mechanisms using simple Lego models with gears, pulleys and levers.  They then designed their own fairground rides and built them from wood with plastic gearing parts.  Finally, they wrote a program to control them in Junior Control Insight and connected the models to the computer via a control box.

Excerpt from the class weblog:

“Next, we read some spooky stories and looked ways of building suspense writing.  We listened to a ghost tour of Chester in England, then wrote our own ghost tour of IBIS school.  This also included some instructions on how to follow the tour.”

The recordings were made on TTS EasySpeak microphones (still available).  These handheld microphones are child friendly and easy to use.  Audio tracks could be transferred to a laptop through a USB connection.

Creating the ghost tour was a lot of fun, especially creating and using some myths about the school and the teachers!  The children had to speak very clearly and sometimes had to re-record their sections several times.