Jumpstart! Apps

Creative learning, ideas and activities for ages 7–11

Natalia Kucirkova, Jon Audain, Liz Chamberlain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138940161
• eBook ISBN: 9781317379218
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This collection of engaging and simple to use activities will jumpstart students' learning and help the busy teacher to reinvigorate their teaching through the use of mobile apps and activities that can be used in the classroom.

A wealth of practical activities and advice on how to incorporate over 40 lively and exciting apps into the classroom will enable teachers to deliver creative lessons. This essential guide focuses on a range of apps, including Skitch, QR codes, Comic Life, Do Ink Green Screen, Puppet Pals, Our Story and much more.

This book offers much needed guidance on creative ways to integrate apps within the National Curriculum and how they can be incorporated into the teaching of Key Stages 1 and 2. Enabling teachers to deliver effective and imaginative lessons through the use of apps and providing links to a wide range of online resources, it covers all core areas of the curriculum:

• English, Maths, Science, Modern Foreign Languages, ICT, History, Geography and PE.

Jumpstart! Apps is an essential classroom resource that will encourage creative and independent learning in children and is the perfect solution for helping teachers, teaching assistants and students integrate apps into their daily practice, make the most of technology at their disposal and deliver imaginative and effective lessons.

Chapter 1 Tablets and iPads

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674452-1

There are various kinds of technologies that might provide the resources necessary for creative activities. This book is concerned with tablets, sometimes called tablet computers. Tablets made by Apple are called iPads and represent the higher end of quality in the tablet market. Google Android tablets are very similar in design and functionality to iPads. In the UK, there are also cheaper alternatives sold by major supermarkets, similar in design to digital book readers. For ease of nomenclature, we will refer to both Android and Apple tablets as ‘tablets’ in this book. However, when describing individual apps, we will specify whether these are available for Android (or Google) tablets or iPads.

Tablets are more affordable than other screen-based technologies used in the school (e.g., interactive whiteboards) and are often available not only in schools but also in children’s homes. There is thus a unique opportunity with tablets to extend learning in one environment to the other one and to bridge the home–school divide. In comparison to previous technologies, a distinct advantage of iPads for schools is that they are lightweight and portable. This means that they can be taken for school trips or used outside the classroom and, unlike desktop PCs, can be used to capture the dynamics of the learning experience as they happen in various locations.

Tablets are not only lighter, but also smaller and thinner than traditional laptops, and children can read text or study images on them as easily as they would with a normal-size book.

The touchscreen of tablets is another important usability feature, allowing quick and easy manipulation, even for children with limited dexterity. Tablets do not require separate input devices like computers (e.g., keyboards and mice), but fuse several technologies into one device: there is an inbuilt camera, microphone and keyboard, facilitating simultaneous activities in one location. The device is flexible enough to accommodate texts and images in various formats (for example, doc, docx and pdf for text) and there are several customisation options for reading the text on screen (e.g., possibility to enlarge the font, change background colour of the text).

Also, tablets come with a simple user interface: most navigation is icon-based, and there is only one main button, the so-called ‘Home’ button. Such an ergonomic design means that even very young children or children with very limited IT skills can proficiently navigate functions which before used to be integral to gadgets only available for older children (e.g., cameras or typewriters).

Another beneficial feature of tablets is that they can accommodate a large number of software programs, the so-called apps. Users can download apps for iPads from the App store and for all other tablets from the Googlemarket store. As of April 2015, there are more than a million apps in the iTunes store available for iPads and out of these, there are about 80 000 apps marketed as educational. There is a similar quantity of apps available for Android tablets. Given the large numbers, any topic covered in the elementary curriculum could potentially be supported by an educational app (Vaala, Ly & Levine, 2015) and several skills, preferences and needs can be catered for. As Sarah, a Year 6 student, said: ‘I really enjoy the iBooks on the tablet because you can find any book; whereas in our library, there isn’t as much variety and choices’ (Ciampa, 2014, p. 91).

However, the large quantity of apps also implies that the quality of individual programs varies widely, and it is often difficult to find an app which would suit a particular teaching activity. In selecting the appropriate app, teachers can rely on other teachers’ review sites (e.g., www.teacherswithapps.com; www.educationappreviews.com) or reviews put together by independent bodies, for example The Children’s Technology Review (www.childrenstech.com).

When teachers choose apps independently, there are some rules of thumb they can follow. For instance, a well-designed app allows children to progress from novice to mastery for a range of skills, building on their motivations and interests. According to Hirsh-Pasek et al. (2015), educational apps are those which promote active, engaged, meaningful and socially interactive learning. Good apps are those which not only motivate but also extend children’s learning, offering open-ended outcomes and incremental progress. In relation to reading for pleasure and supporting effective literacy engagement with digital books, Kucirkova, Littleton and Cremin (2016) outline six facets of reader engagement: affective, creative, interactive, shared, sustained and personalised reading engagements.

In practice, the characteristics of an app dovetail with those of the tablets, jointly supporting an activity. For example, creating digital multimodal stories with iPads is possible thanks to the features inbuilt in the hardware (microphone, front and back-facing digital camera, wifi networking capability) and apps allowing children to put their audio-visual contents together and share in one package with their friends online (e.g., the Our Story or Book Creator apps).

Balanced against these benefits, there are also limitations to the usefulness of tablets in classrooms. Two of the most significant hurdles preventing tablets’ use in classrooms are the tablets’ cost and teachers’ confidence with technology. While tablets bring a lot of potential for reduction in costs associated with printing, storage and distribution of books and textual material, there is an initial investment. Different schools have used different strategies to purchase tablets, including the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) model, subscription schemes or acquiring funds through parents’ donations.

So that tablets are effectively used in classrooms, there needs to be ICT support in the school and some accompanying material for effective educational deployment of the devices. As with any technology or new resources more generally, there is a need for teacher training and professional development specifically tailored to the school’s needs. It is also important that teachers are given extra time to identify the relevant apps that can support their lesson aims and objectives. It goes without saying that using tablets in a school efficiently also requires a robust wifi and broadband connectivity and funds necessary for tablet accessories (such as protective covers, cases, keyboards, headphones or chargers). It is beyond the scope of this book to outline these elements in more detail, but we highlight their importance before teachers embark on a creative journey of tablet use in their individual classrooms.

Different teachers use tablets in different ways, but typically, tablets work best when teachers identify a clear purpose of their use for a given activity. The context and content of the learning activity matter (Guernsey, 2012). Teachers need to think about how the activity fits their learning goals and how the tablet offers extra opportunities for specific children, including the highly talented as well as those with specific educational needs (Kucirkova, 2014).

While this book focuses on teachers’ creative practices, it is often the case that children are app experts, with a lot of prior experience of apps’ use or design. We therefore encourage teachers to support children in not only using but also co-creating apps and the learning content. Teachers can include children in their lesson plans and/or nominate some individuals to act as digital ambassadors. Digital ambassadors (sometimes called ‘iChampions’) can report about new apps, take care of the equipment or support children with less developed IT skills. Empowering children in managing the use of tablets in the classroom can be a very creative way of generating new ideas and igniting children’s interest.

References

• Ciampa, K. (2014). Learning in a mobile age: an investigation of student motivation. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 30(1), 82–96.
• Guernsey, L. (2012). Screen Time: How Electronic Media – From Baby Videos to Educational Software – Affects Your Young Child. Philadelphia: Basic Books.
• Hirsh-Pasek, K. , Zosh, J. M. , Golinkoff, R. M. , Gray, J. H. , Robb, M. B. & Kaufman, J. (2015). Putting education in ‘educational’ apps: lessons from the science of learning. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 16(1), 3–34.
• Kucirkova, N. (2014). iPads in early education: separating assumptions and evidence. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. DOI:10. 3389/fpsyg.2014.00715
• Kucirkova, N. , Littleton, K. & Cremin, T. (2016). Young children’s reading for pleasure with digital books: six key facets of engagement. Cambridge Journal of Education, 1–18. DOI: 10.1080/0305764X.2015.1118441
• Vaala, S. , Ly, A. & Levine, M. H. (2015). Getting a Read on the App Stores: A Market Scan and Analysis of Children’s Literacy Apps. New York: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.

Chapter 2 Creativity What do we mean by it?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674452-2

Given that creativity is a multidimensional phenomenon and is often defined differently by different people, we need to specify what we mean by creative learning in this book.

When documenting and evaluating teachers’ creative ways of using apps to support children’s learning, we adopted the framework of possibility thinking. Possibility thinking foregrounds the notion of exploratory transitions from ‘what is’ to ‘what might be’ which enables children to engage in imagining worlds ‘as if’ they were in a different role (Craft, 2011b). Possibility thinking is core to creativity because it is the process through which questions are asked and problems are foregrounded (Jeffrey & Craft, 2004, p. 81). It involves a range of processes and children’s behaviours, including question-posing, play, immersion, innovation, risk-taking, being imaginative, self-determination and intentionality. Possibility thinking is about ‘problem solving as in a puzzle, finding alternative routes to a barrier, the posing of questions and the identification of problems and issues’ (Jeffrey & Craft, 2004, p. 80).

How can teachers support possibility thinking? Building on Craft’s (2001, 2011a, 2012) theoretical proposition, Grainger and Cremin (2001) outlined the ways in which adults (notably teachers) can facilitate and provide opportunities for children’s possibility thinking in the classroom. In a series of studies, Cremin and colleagues (2006) observed and documented the practices of creative teachers in UK schools and identified three pedagogical strategies creative teachers employ to nurture possibility thinking in children’s learning experiences:

1. the ‘standing back’ strategy in which the teachers discursively position themselves as agents of possibilities or ‘what if’ agents;
2. profiling learner agency, exemplified in action through the establishment of groups;
3. creating time and space in which learners’ ideas were taken seriously and their independence was nurtured.

Creative teachers are thus those teachers who recognise the humanising potential of aesthetic, artistic and embodied knowledge and who are able to incorporate novel resources into their practice. They are not afraid to take risks and to go beyond...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Frontmatter
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Tablets and iPads
• 2 Creativity: what do we mean by it?
• 3 Skitch: editing and doodling on documents
• 4 QR codes: accessing and creating information points
• 5 Comic Life: your learning in pictures
• 6 Personalising with Our Story app
• 7 Explain Everything: really, explain anything and everything
• 8 Do Ink Green Screen: imagine away your classroom
• 9 Padlet: collaboration starting with a blank page
• 10 Scratch: coding, computational thinking and problem-solving
• 11 Puppet Pals: I Can Animate
• 12 Welcome to our digital museum
• 13 Superheroes
• 14 Crime scene investigations
• 15 Story making
• 16 ‘Great British Bake Off’
• Teacher tools