WELL IT’S A GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS SCENARIO.
So the bad news first – we didn’t get our grant to finance a class set of iTouch iPod devices. So much for all the research on educational uses and storage ideas!
However the Bowra Bunch will not be daunted! So the good news is we have ONE iTouch device and we are going to use it to the best educational advantage that we can manage.
My last resort was to email a request to our school principal for more money to buy an inexpensive set of headphones mic lead and an Apple USB Power Adapter so we can store the iTouch in the Netbook storage trolley and know that each morning the netbooks and the iTouch are charged up ready for the day’s lessons. The result was a reply email that simply stated ‘Go for it Chookie’. So I did:) And here is how we will attempt to utilise our iTouch amongst our 45 students at Mary’s Bowraville!
So with the USB adapter we can add our one iTouch to the Netbook Trolley along with our 15 netbooks for storage and charging.
Bowra ways with iTouch
iTune APPS
These are applications for simple games and puzzles that give students problem solving activities in a school environment where we encourage software resilience, persistence and completion of a task. Most of the instructions were available on the Apps site from iTunes and therefore students are challenged to turn, shake or perform a variety of screen taps to successfully engage in their chosen activity. Other KLA apps give students interesting ways to reference or skill drill. Remember that Apps are not the whole teaching tool for education. We have found that our students are keen to work their way through an activity as a reward or special opportunity to engage in a reference activity by connecting to the Internet with our school iTouch.
- Fun apps – such as ‘iSwap faces, paper toss, Skate Grind, tubes maze and conventional games like chess, connect four, draughts, tic tac toe
- Music apps – piano keyboards and drum kits and guitar chords and xylophone and songs and metronome, beatbox
- Literacy Apps –dictionary, word searches, spelling, phonics, letter scramble, stories, thesaurus, letter tracing, flash card maker, grammar
- Numeracy Apps – times tables, shapes, conversion charts, maths problem solving
- Science Apps – astrology, science glossary, planets,
- HSIE apps – Australian constitution, countries, cities, Google earth,
- Health – iBrush teeth, nutrition tips, heartbeats, drivers ed, bones, BMI, recipes, first aid
- RE – Noah’s ark story, bible, prayers,
- Art – whiteboard, doodle, photo sketch, art history, colouring
- Languages – when we studied Japan this year, we used the Japan ‘lite’ apps to practice simple greetings in Japanese
MOVIES – Downloading free Movies in mpeg4 format from VideoJug gave us an assortment of videos to watch. This is a free account but you can only download several movies each day. By saving them on the desktop they can easily be dragged into the ‘Movies’ section on the iTune’s Device list when sync our St Mary’s iTouch. Initially I downloaded a variety of “How to” movies that included magic coin tricks, juggling, soccer skills, moon walking, using capital letters, and commas. We had created a movie to inspire the Olympians last year and ours WON. So of course it is included in our movie list too
AUDIO Books- The latest or most popular audio books for children can be downloaded from iTunes Store but as we are on a budget, I discovered free audio stories in MP3 format such as Story Nory and PBS Kids. Our first list included: crafts, sign language, “The Brave Little Tailor”, “The Wizard who stole Katie’s spells” and “The Raven”
DOCUMENT STORAGE and RETRIEVAL Using iPhone Explore software (discovered on Google) on our PC laptop I could utilize the GoodReader Apps from iTunes ($1.99) in order to store, open and enlarge text from word documents, PDFs and spreadsheets that teachers can prepare for their students
QUIZZES – A great discovery was the iQuiz program that enables you to fill in quiz templates with questions and answers however it is only available for Mac users. The PC friendly program is being developed. So I got to thinking how we could create appropriate quizzes with the tools that we already have. Presentations can easily be created for our Personal Response devices for children to use the clickers to vote their personal answers to the class question on the slide. I created a clone slide for each question slide but indicated the correct answer on the second clone slide by using the Autoshape tools available in word documents.
By converting these presentations into JPEG formats they can be saved into an appropriately named folder and stored in the Pictures folder in our iTunes. These could have converted the presentation into a PDF but it is a bit more exciting to tap the screen and the correct answer ‘appears’ because you have actually advanced to the next picture image.
iTunes Uis part of the iTunes store and contains thousands of media files from K-12 resources and university lectures shared in one convenient place. Students can gain access by using their iPhone or iPod touch using your Apple ID account. Futhermore your educational team can create manage their own learning environment by uploading media files to iTunes U. So it makes sense to tap into this learning in hand environment that is so familiar to our students today. Here are a few that were downloaded to trial during Term 4 (Clouds K-2, Claymation K-3, Fractions and Decimals 3-5, For the Love of Teaching – staff)
PODCASTS-downloaded from the iTunes store for staff development and student’s stories. And of course we can make our own with Audacity as we have done so in the past. I added our few podcasts from our previous experiments.
VOICE MEMO and RECORDING.We needed a recording device and I found a simple and inexpensive device from iTunes Store to turn our iTouch iPod into a recording device. This is where the earphone/mic set will come in handy. 
Several Apps have been downloaded from the Store but I found this one to be the most effective as it captured, stored and labeled the memo easily. Now we just need to practice recording our reflective memos!
Here is a great U-Tube video to help us make good use of this recording APPs. I hope you find it useful too.
Well this is our Plan B for using our iTouch device in an educational setting at St Mary’s Bowraville. Having only one device will be a challenge but that is the stuff we are made of at St Mary’s! The Chookie has landed and the Bowra Mob will start experimenting over the next few terms. This is just a reflection of our journey and as far as the analogy goes – we are still looking at the road map! Although we are a very small school with a very small budget, we focus on ways to provide our students with some resources coupled with a lot of creativity to stand amongst the giants of the diocese.
Wish us luck!
![IMG_0054[1]](http://stmarysbowraville.edublogs.org/files/2009/09/IMG_00541-300x225.jpg "IMG_0054[1]")
This of course comes at a price (over $2000 for the cart. $7,000 if you buy all the iTouch devices to go with the cart). I hope that one day we can purchase such an impresive unit – have a look at the specs!
