Transforming proof reading with an iPad
Posted by Allanah King on February 15, 2012
As you may know the Link Learning ICT Cluster has loaned me an iPad to use with my teaching, to download apps that may be useful for learning and to recommend to teachers the apps that prove themselves to be powerful learning tools.
There is only the one iPad in the school and it is only there on the one day a week that I teach so, as you can imagine, it’s a pretty scarce commodity that’s much used when it is at school. I try to have it in children’s hands as much as possible by pairing children up, allowing the children to use my iPhone and iPod Touch and trying to make sure each child gets some iPad time each day when I am teaching.
Yesterday children were finishing off and proof reading a ‘beginning of the school year’ story.
Here’s a little original idea I had – I don’t get many of those so I thought I had better share it pretty quick.
I will call the child in this story Smilie cos he didn’t want to be named! Smilie told me that he written his story and that he had finished proof reading it. I loved the story- it made me laugh out loud and with Smilie’s permission I read it to the class. I took a photo of a Smilie’s draft writing with the iPad 2 camera and put it up on the ordinary whiteboard with the data projector. I called the class together and together we looked at what we might do to edit the text.
Then I switched the data projector off, leaving just the editing. We then looked at patterns with the things we edited and saw that Smilie need to work on identifying spelling errors in words that he really does know, to make sure the full stops are in the right place and put capitals after all the full stops.
I could have probably done this activity without the iPad just using a digital camera and a heap of cords but the joy of using the iPad is that it can happen in the wink of an eye, as the need arises.
As a corollary to this activity I am preparing an after school workshop tomorrow on creative iPad apps so set to work turning Smilie’s story into a book with the Scribblepress app on the iPad.
As Kevin Honeycutt did at Learning at School I decided to buy a hard cover copy of the illustrated test run of the app. The Scribblepress people were very helpful via Twitter when I got stuck at one stage and to clarify things they sent me a pdf of the story. Here it is with the story by Smilie and the drawings and photos by me!
The hardcover book should arrive in 5-7 days- I can’t wait! Click on the book cover or this link to see how it looks a real book!
February 15th, 2012 at 4:42 pm
Well Allanah, that makes my heart sing! I am always in awe of your ability to find the MAGIC in every activity. How powerful is it to see patterns in the editing? How much more powerful seeing only the editing! I can’t wait to try this when I am back! As for scribble press, I think it is MAGIC! Can’t wait for the ‘book party’!
AK
February 15th, 2012 at 7:26 pm
I love your work Allanah! Such simple, practical and highly effective ideas. Thanks for sharing.
February 15th, 2012 at 7:53 pm
Fantastic idea Alannah. I love the potential power of seeing the patterns. All made super super easy with photo streaming! I can’t wait to give this idea a go. Thanks
February 16th, 2012 at 2:04 am
What a great idea and great use of iPad! There is so much potential, isn’t there!
February 16th, 2012 at 9:20 am
I can imagine how engaging that activity was for all the class and particularly for Smilie. I love the next step of making a book. Smilie will feeel like a REAL author. It will be interesting to see if this leads to a greater motivation for writing.
February 16th, 2012 at 9:24 am
I can imagine how engaging that activity was for all the class and particularly Smilie.I love the next step of making a book. Smmilie will feel like a real author.It will be interesting to see if this leads to greater motivation for writing.
February 16th, 2012 at 3:43 pm
That’s a great use of the iPad for editing. The camera on the iPad sure is a powerful tool, isn’t it? No need for bells and whistles. Tina
February 19th, 2012 at 8:02 pm
I have tinkered with proofreading kids’ digital work with a number of iPad tools such as ShowMe, ReplayNote, GoodReader…
I even went so far as to see how Puppet Pals might work for proofreading. I used GoodReader to make the visual annotations to the work, and then set the pdf I had created as the set for my puppet show.
I’m not sure if I can embed it here, but I’ll try:
If that doesn’t work, here is the permalink: http://youtu.be/hqL5cIcYflM
February 19th, 2012 at 8:57 pm
Clever you, Deon
The embed worked. Snap!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiYLIlxmnJg
I had a go with Puppet Pals for proof reading too!
The thing is though that I only have one iPad in the whole school so it is a balance between giving the kids a go and using it on the fly as a teacher tool as well.
February 19th, 2012 at 9:01 pm
That is a challenge, Allanah. Working with older kids, I email these kinds of movies to them, so they can then go back and make amendments. With younger students, handing them the iPad to check up on would work, I guess. The big picture is that the iPad CAN revolutionise the way we provide feedback to students, and because of its ability to be projected, the iPad is a tool that can be useful where there is only one in a class (school!) or where every kid has their own.
Great stuff!
February 21st, 2012 at 4:20 pm
Wow! Inspirational. Loved Smilie’s story…nek minnit…LOVE IT! and your use of the iPad was very cool too. Reckon that’ll have an impact on student motivation for sure.
April 4th, 2012 at 8:49 am
The book arrived and it was a very high quality hard page book. Smilie and his parents loved it.
April 15th, 2012 at 5:16 pm
Hi Allanah!
Wow what a great way to teach proof reading. Its always such a huge issue every year when it comes to teaching kids how to write effectively. I like the idea of taking away the text (turning off the projector) and just seeing the patterns. I loved Smilies story too! Very cool! Thanks for sharing.
June 7th, 2012 at 10:01 pm
AllanahK that was genius! Soooo simple and Deon, that was brilliantly bonkers, the kids would love it. We are beginning to work with more and more iOS devices and you can follow our progress here:
http://www.spiketown.wordpress.com
Andrew