Almost as Good As Being There

Today I had the pleasure of reading to the children of Tua Marina School as part of their fabulous book week. Barbara Keane had organised guest readers to come in each day at 10:30 to read to the children.

Today was their wonderful dress up as a book character day and I got to read the first chapter of one of one of my favourites classics….. The Iron Man.

I had managed to source an on line version of the Iron Man as well so senior children could continue reading and finish off the story if they were inspired to do so.

I used Call Recorder on my MacBook to record the reading, edited the length a bit with Quicktime and uploaded it to Vimeo for your viewing pleasure!!

We talk about working blended and flipping the classroom- well here is one way how that might happen. It certainly saves on travel and time. And I love reading to kids and seeing the light in their eyes.

And at the end I got thanked by a real princess Cinderella!!!

Iron Man from Allanah King on Vimeo.

One avid reader of this blog read the story to his children who set about on a wet Saturday to do a little creating. Very cool response to reading!!!!

 

Enhancing Workflow on an iPad

At the end of last term I was asked to lead a couple of presentations for the Learning at School Conference Roadshow run by CORE Education here in Nelson. It was the first time such an event had been held in the provinces and was really well supported by locals and from those further afield as well.

The presentation that I had not done before was Enhancing Workflow with an iPad- combining apps to share the learning. Here it is below.

 

I didn’t want to just spend the time just talking to the teachers at the workshop I wanted them to talk to each other- to share the learning that they already knew and become teachers themselves. And to have a base level of knowing how to work their iPad to do basic things before we went on to more advanced learning.

I went down to the local supermarket beforehand and bought a package of the now famous iPad cleaners as prizes and made up a bingo board for each person.

The deal was that people had to walk around the room and find someone who could show them how to do the tasks on the bingo board, that person showed them, then they had to do the task themselves. Then they could initial the bingo board. When they had five squares initialled in a row they yelled ‘Allanah’ and got a prize!

I was surprised the number of people who carried on just as eagerly after they had got a prize because they wanted to learn more. Eventually I felt I had to stop people so we could move on to the more advanced learning but I felt the whole session went really well because it was an energiser as well as a great learning opportunity.

iPad Bingo Chart- click on it to go to the Google Doc

To make it easy for you to personalise and make the resource your own I have made the bingo form into a Google Doc that you can copy and make your own with your own email address and the like.

The activity with all the links to the pdf tutorials and activities can be viewed and downloaded from the presentation above. It is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike which means you are welcome to mash-up and repurpose the presentation but please acknowledge the source.

The activity was very well received with participants coming to me later saying how much they enjoyed the opportunity to move and talk and share rather than being talked to for the entire presentation.

You may like to try the same sort of thing when you next share your learning with others.

I later repeated the presentation at the BYOD Conference run by Learning NetworkNZ at Albany Senior High School in the holidays.

iPad Bingo at BYOD Conference at Albany Senior High School