Angela Harley writes:

In Sacred Heart we set for Maths. I used the i pod touched with the children in my group. I have a group of very bright P.7 children and a group of children from P4- P.6 who can be challenging to hold their attention.

With the P.7 children they took ten minute slots each on the maths games pre loaded on the i-pods, daily. The aim was to challenge their mental maths skill and for them to beat their own scores and times. The children had a great deal of fun and it encouraged independent working. The children kept their own records of scores and made sure the allocated times was shared among the group.

With my other group they also used the pre-loaded games but at a less challenging level. My aim was to use the i-pods to encourage the children to work smarter and maintain their focus on their work. Each day the children had to be at a certain point in their work before they got their slot on the i-pods. This worked well and the children aimed to complete tasks to get their go, This group of children were not fully aware that the games I asked them to go on were in fact improving their mental maths skills.

In my own class I also used the i-pods as an incentive to promote positive behaviour. The children opted to use the i-pod touches for their Golden Time. The condition was that they had to have their full Golden Time by the end of the week. This seemed to work well especially with boys who display negative behaviours in the class. If they did lose Golden Time then they worked greatly on the positive side to earn it back. On this occasion I let the children use any of the pre-loaded games and some connected to the internet.