Category Archives: Early years

iPad – Your starter apps

If you’ve recently been handed a council iPad to use in teaching and learning then you’ll notice some apps come pre-installed.

Here you’ll find video tutorial basics with links to further online training when they’re ready 🙂

Book Creator

Probably the best of the bunch in that it can pull together all your pictures and videos in one place, you can draw, write, records your voice telling the story (check out this example )

It is SO simple to use and we’ve seen it used across the spectrum from early years to senior phase. For example pupils creating a visual diary of their school trip, a pupil portfolio solution for teachers and pupils, creating a recipe book for Global Citizenship learning. It comes with your iPad AND they’ve just added the ability to create comics!

Guide to Book Creator

Puppet Pals HD

Puppet pals is such a great app for creativity and telling stories. Essentially it lets you create puppet shows where you can select characters and backdrops and records different scenes to tell your story. Even better you can take pictures of people or take photos of characters in  books and cut them out to use as your puppets – kids love seeing themselves as puppets and they tell the best stories when they are in charge. I’ve seen it used in multiple ways – from pupils telling the story of a historical character or children retelling the story of an incident of bullying and how they want it to be fixed. It’s only our own imagination which limit the possibilities of this app.

Pic-Collage

This is an easy to use app for making image collages for sharing your experiences and learning, mood boards, artwork and photography, evidence of progress, comics…dozens of applications in your classroom.

Explain Everything

An incredibly powerful too – it’s both an interactive whiteboard and a screen casting tool (where it records all the things you do and say on the board and saves as a video for pupils to watch again and again)

-Tutorials soon