Author: Miss Abercrombie

Notes

Apple Notes – the versatile digital notebook for quick capture, sketching, and organisation.

🔍 What does it do?

Notes is a built-in app on iPad that allows you to combine typed text, handwriting, photos, and scanned documents in one place. It syncs across all your Apple devices and, thanks to the Quick Note feature, can be accessed instantly from any other app on your iPad.

🎓 Why is it useful?

  • Quick Access: You can swipe from the corner of the screen or use the Control Center to start a note in a second. It is the fastest way for pupils to record a thought before they forget it.

  • Smart Scanning: It has a high-quality document scanner built-in. It automatically detects edges and cleans up shadows,turning physical paper into a digital PDF within your note.

  • Touch-Friendly Drawing: The built-in markup tools allow pupils to use their fingers to draw diagrams, highlight text, or annotate photos with ease.

  • Seamless Collaboration: You can share a note or an entire folder with colleagues or pupils. Everyone can contribute, and you’ll see “Activity” highlights showing exactly what has been added or changed.

⚙️ How does it work?

  1. Launch: Find the Notes icon (yellow and white pad).

  2. Quick Note: Swipe up from the bottom-right corner of your screen at any time to open a small floating note – perfect for jotting down a thought while browsing Safari.

  3. Scan a Document: Tap the Camera icon in Notes and select Scan Documents. Point the camera at a worksheet or textbook page, and it will capture it automatically.

  4. Organise with Tags: Use hashtags (e.g., #LessonPlans or #Maths) anywhere in your note. This makes finding specific information across multiple folders much faster.

  5. Lock a Note: If you have sensitive information (like password reminders or meeting notes), you can “Lock” a note using your iPad passcode or FaceID.

🚀 Beyond the Basics

  • Checklists: Pupils can create interactive to-do lists for their writing projects. As they complete a draft, peer-edit, or check spellings, they can “tick” the bubbles to track their progress.

  • Searchable Handwriting: The iPad’s built-in “AI” (OCR) recognizes handwriting. If a pupil has handwritten notes, they can use the Search bar to find a specific word.

  • Maps & Links: While researching, pupils can “Add Link” to a note from Safari or Maps. It creates a rich visual thumbnail, making the note a visual “Research Hub.”

  • Smart Folders: Create a folder that automatically gathers every note containing a specific tag (like #P7Transitions). It saves you from manually moving files and keeps your admin organised.

🔗 Teacher Quick Links

Use Notes on your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch

Getting Started with Notes

 

Keynote

More than a presentation tool, Keynote is an animation studio and digital canvas for creative learning.

 

🔍 What does it do?

Keynote is Apple’s flagship presentation app. On the iPad, it allows pupils to combine text, high-quality shapes, photos, videos, and live audio. Its standout feature is its powerful animation engine, which allows pupils to move objects across the screen to explain concepts, tell stories, or create their own mini-movies.

 

🎓 Why is it useful?

  • Magic Move: This is the “secret sauce” of Keynote. By simply duplicating a slide and moving an object to a new position, Keynote automatically animates the movement between them. It’s the easiest way for pupils to create professional-looking animations.

  • Infinite Shapes Library: Keynote contains thousands of professional shapes – from animals and nature to symbols and science equipment. Pupils can “break apart” these shapes to customise them or use them as building blocks for their own designs.

  • Interactive Storytelling: Pupils can add “links” to shapes or text that jump to different slides. This allows them to create “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories or interactive museum exhibits.

  • Live Video: You can drop a “Live Video” feed onto a slide. This shows the iPad’s camera view directly on the slide, allowing a pupil to be “part of the presentation” or demonstrate a physical object while their information is displayed alongside it.

 

⚙️ How does it work?

  1. Launch: Open the Keynote app (Blue icon with a white lectern).

  2. Start a Theme: Tap the ‘+’ to create a new presentation. For creative projects, the “Basic White” or “Basic Black” themes are often best.

  3. Add Content: Use the icons at the top to add Shapes, Photos/Videos, Audio Recordings, or Tables.

  4. Animate: Tap an object and select ‘Animate’. Use ‘Action’ to create a custom path with your finger, or ‘Transitions’ to add Magic Move between slides.

  5. Export: Tap the ‘Share’ button (box with arrow) and select ‘Export’. You can save the project as a Movie or a GIF, making it easy to share on Teams or Google Classroom.

 

🚀 Beyond the Basics

  • Animated Retellings: Pupils can use the Shapes library to find characters for a story. Using Magic Move, they can make the characters “walk” across the screen while they record a voiceover narration using the ‘Record Audio’ tool.

  • Shape & Symmetry: Give pupils a set of basic shapes. They can use the Format (Paintbrush) tool to rotate, flip, and resize them to create symmetrical patterns or “shape pictures” (like a house made of a square and triangle).

  • Animated Cycles: Use Keynote to explain the Water Cycle or Plant Growth. Pupils can animate water droplets rising (evaporation) or a seed growing into a flower using the ‘Draw Path’ animation tool with their finger.

  • Interactive Maps: Find a map of a country. Pupils can place “invisible” shapes over cities. When someone taps the city during the presentation, it links to a slide with more information about that location.

  • Green Screen Backgrounds: Pupils can design a beautiful, static background in Keynote, export it as an image, and then use it as their backdrop in iMovie for a green-screen news report.

🔗 Teacher Quick Links

Get Started with Keynote on iPad

Jacob’s Quick Tips – Keynote for iPad

Microsoft Lens

Microsoft Lens, turn physical paper into accessible digital text in seconds.

 

🔍 What does it do?

Microsoft Lens is a scanning app that uses the iPad camera to “read” the world around it. It automatically crops and cleans up photos of whiteboards, worksheets, or book pages. More importantly, it uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to turn the text in those photos into digital content that can be read aloud, edited, or translated.

🎓 Why is it useful?

  • Instant Accessibility: Students who find reading difficult can take a photo of any page and have it read to them by saving their scan into OneNote and using Immersive Reader.

  • No More Manual Typing: If you have a physical worksheet but lost the digital file, Lens can scan it and “extract” the text to a Word document for you to edit.

  • High-Quality Scanning: It automatically fixes “wonky” angles and removes glare from whiteboards, making classroom notes clear and easy to read later.

  • Glow Integration: Scanned documents can be saved directly into your OneDrive, OneNote.

 

⚙️ How does it work?

  1. Open the App: Point your iPad camera at a document, whiteboard, or book.

  2. Select a Mode: Swipe between Document (for paper), Whiteboard (to remove glare), or Actions (to extract text or tables to a copy and passable piece of text). You can also extract text from previously taken images.

  3. Snap & Trim: Take the photo. Lens will automatically find the edges of the paper, but you can adjust them manually if needed.

  4. Choose a Destination: Tap Done and select where you want it to go. Please note that choosing Immersive Reader directly on the save screen does not work, please save to OneDrive and then tap the image once it has processed to access Immersive Reader in OneNote for audio support.

🚀 Beyond the Basics

  • Alongside OneNote: A pupil can take a photo of a textbook page and export it to OneNote. Once in OneNote they can select Immersive Reader, here they can change the font size, background colour, make use of picture dictionary and have the text read aloud – giving them independent access to the curriculum.

  • Jotter to OneNote: Pupils can take photos of their handwritten work in their jotters. Lens cleans up the image and saves it into their OneNote Class Notebook, creating a permanent digital record of their physical work

 

Support for your school digital learning journey

When your school is looking to move forward in its digital learning journey, where do you start?

You may be reflecting on where you are, where you want to be, and what needs done to move further along the road in embedding digital technology across the school, at all stages and across the curriculum to make a positive difference to learning and teaching – and every school will be different.

The signposts below to the resources you may find useful, whatever your starting point, will help you gauge where your school is right now, help your school define a vision, map out the steps to take to move forward, identify the strengths, experiences and roles of everyone in your school community, set markers to track your journey, and celebrate the successes.

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Project Evolve: help equip children and young people for digital life

What is it?

ProjectEVOLVE provides a framework and progression with matched activities and resources, to support anyone working with children and young people to equip them for digital life, from early years to age 18. ProjectEVOLVE takes the hundreds of statements from UK Council for Internet Safety’s (UKCIS) framework “Education for a Connected World” and marries together perspectives, research, activities, outcomes, supporting resources and professional development materials. ProjectEVOLVE is free to use.

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