With more and more technology becoming prominent in the raising of children it is no shock that present and future generations will be digital natives (Prensky,2001). On a day to day basis you will hear someone talking about young people always being on their phone doing useless things. Now, imagine young people using such technology to learn. Phones and tablets now have apps that turn their phone into an eBook. It has already been proven that iPad’s have positive learning outcomes when used to their full effect (Burden et. al., 2012). This proves that if applied correctly young learners can be influenced in a very positive way.
In this week’s session we were set a task to create a summary of a famous children’s book. To do this we were to use the “Book Creator” app. I hadn’t used this app very much so I was quite hesitant about how effective it would be. However, once I had played about with it for a while, I realised that there was a lot of tools available that made it very easy to use and simple to create a summary of the book.
I chose to create a summary of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” by Robert Southey, as it was a firm favourite of the pupils at my placement school and I was familiar with the story. For my eBook I decided to create the summary and create my pictures to show what was going on. This means that my eBook was multimodal as it used two semiotic systems; visual and linguistic. I believe this would engage the reader more than if it was just words. To engage the reader even more I put a series of questions at the end about Goldilocks behaviour. This meant the child had to pay attention throughout the story and would learn right from wrong. This was important to me as I believe you should always learn something from a book, and this ensured that the young learner was able to give feedback on what she could have done differently.
Overall, I believe that “book Creator” helped me to achieve a good summary of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and would definitely use it again to create a story for young learners. If I was to change anything, I would have included sound. I saw the use of sound in other people’s story’s and it added another element which I believe would enhance the learning of young people.
References
Prensky, M. (2001) Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. MCB University Press.
Burden, K., Hopkins, P., Male, T., Martin, S. and Trala, C. (2012) iPad Scotland Evaluation. [Online] Available: http://moodle1819.uws.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/39914/mod_resource/content/2/Scotland-iPad-Evaluation.pdf [accessed 10th February]
