Write About This- Pinterest

You know I like Write About This and they recently tweeted that they are storing writing prompts in Pinterest. What a great idea!

How to embed a You Tube Video from Explain Everything onto a Blog

If you were wondering why I have a video about Kereru on this blog it is because I was making a tutorial about how to add video to a blog but not use the laptop at all.

Here is the link to the blog post about how to put it all together. Watch the second video for another way of doing it.

Here is the original tutorial video.

New Keyboards

Over the holidays I updated my iPad to iOS8 which allows for users to install new keyboards from app developers. I have had Swype on my 3G Android Camera for some time and liked it. I wondered how it would go with kids. Some liked it and some didn't. I think if you are very much a struggling writer then tapping each letter as you go would be a better option but for those who have some writing skills under their belt Swping would be worth persisting with to get the hang of it.

Play the video in full screen to see what T is saying and Swyping to see how it is supporting his writing.

T doesn't know how to spell through and spelt it as thought but when he spells operation as operasion the app leads him to the correct spelling and gives him close choices should his Swping be less than accurate.

I also liked the way that he pauses to think of the word in chunks to better help him break down the writing process. The video helps us see his thinking processes as he is writing- making learning visible.

I notice that T is also pushing the space bar for spaces between words. The app knows where the spaces are as he takes his finger off the screen so he doesn't necessarily need to do that.

Swype from Allanah King on Vimeo.

The other keyboard that I think that would be good to install as a choice with be Lower Case Keyboard by our very own Matt Thomas.

Matt has made the lower case keyboard with the Open Dyslexic font so as to better support learners who find differentiating letters tricky.

Just a note though that there is a bit of an iOS bug at the moment and you need to turn off guided access before you can install the new keyboards. I am sure it will be ironed out before too long.

Dragon Dictate

Today I thought I would give the kiwi version of Dragon Dictate on iPad a trial and see if the boys had the oral language skill to be able to dictate their writing. I have had the American version of Dragon Dictate for a while. It was not available in the New Zealand iTunes store as it was not optimised for our accent.

I had high hopes that it would be more accurate now it has been released to New Zealand.

On opening the app it asked for access to my contacts. I disallowed as the thought of it being able to access my contacts made me nervous. So I would expect that recognising names might be problematic but I am not sure what use access to my contacts might give it.

I quickly showed the boys how to work the app. I decided to have them start and stop recording so it better teaches the boys about speaking in sentences and doesn't give the app too much to do at one time.

The app sort of got most of the words right but so much time was spent fixing up the missed text that I wonder how useful it would be long term.

We were trying to write, 'The fish tried to get away' but even after practising the sentence a couple of times the best we could manage was, 'Best try to keep away.' Not really helping a lot.

I asked the boys which they preferred and they said they wanted to persist with it.

I wonder what else we can do to make the app more responsive???

Any thoughts????? How have you found it?

Resilience

Today's start to the new term was more of a lesson in resilience- for me- I think the boys didn't notice.

I had a plan that involved going outside the classroom and taking photos. It was raining. Hard.

I had a plan that the boys would use their iPads- they were flat after the holidays.

I had a plan that the boys would use the text feature of Tellagami- that feature didn't work today- there was an encoding problem.

I had a plan that the boys could all Flick their videos to me- Ethan's refused to.

We boxed on and made it work- as we do.

The boys wrote their stories into Tellagami text- I took a photo of the text on my phone- and the boys read aloud the text from my phone.

Not exactly what I had in mind but most of the boys had something to show for it at the end. The time frame is very short and I am a bit concerned that the boys are only writing very briefly in the time we have for the lesson.

I am going to see if a combination of blogging and images provides more opportunities for writing next week but most of the boys don't know their log in.

I will go through and log in for each boy and see if I can log in on their behalf so we don't stall before we even start when we try to blog next week.

AR Dinosaur

This week we had lots of fun taking dinosaur photos of ourselves using the iPad app AR Dinopark. You get the app for free but you have to pay $1.29 for each extra dinosaur!

Here is a slideshow of our images - set to some scary dinosaur music using my favourite slideshow app- Photopeach.

Here are some of the short stories inspired by the dinosaur images...

My favourite dino is the velociraptor. They are big and ferocious. They are meat eaters and have sharp teeth.

The famous dinosaur hunter got a phone call in 1914 about a triceratops in the Chinese jungle so he went out in his camouflage truck and began his search. Four hours later he began to hear a loud roar so he was close to it. He was actually scared.

1982. Me and my two brothers were out hunting in the jungle. We had just caught a 150 pound boar. It attracted a pack of velociraptors. Me and my brothers were fighting for our lives. One survived the fight but my brothers were killed by the vicious velociraptor so I fought that last one with my bare hands and killed it. "That's for my brothers. You beast!!!"

This was a great last day of the term activity and I really would have liked to have spent more time talking about how to compose the snapshots to make them look realistic. Forty minutes seems long enough but by the time we round up the forgetters, sort their flat iPads, set up the lesson, compose the images and do some writing the time is all gone. I am wondering if we need longer next term.

I gave the boys a short survey for the end of term which took time in this session too. I asked the boys what they learnt about learning this term. I was impressed with some of their answers. If they really did learn never to give up then that was the best thing!!!

What have you learnt about learning this term?

• writing faster
• writing about ourselves,
• how to use apps
• sharing things
• never give up
• to have fun
• write with describing words

I also asked what they might change next term. Apart from one who wanted hamburgers instead of Subway lunches here are some other suggestions...

What would you change for next term?

• more games
• more hunting and fishing stories
• more people
• sharing more
• happy- I would change nothing!
• once finished you get free time on the iPad
• write longer stories on the laptops too
• to make a movie on the iPad

I was unhappy to note that when I asked who they had shared their learning with most just said me, a couple said their parents and a couple said their peers.

Next term I want to really push getting that authentic audience- to let the boys know that people a re reading their writing.

Using Aurasma and String Augmented Reality Apps as a prompt for writing.

I put a link here to Daveyhulme School blog post about combining Aurasma and String as a prompt for writing and I don't want to forget to have a go at it. I reckon it would be great to have some physical places the boys could go to see their work. QR Codes and Aurasma seem the obvious choice.

http://mrparkinsonict.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/using-augmented-reality-to-inspire.html

Aliens in the Classroom!

Using the App String, children were able to scan a picture and see an alien moving around the classroom - an amazing WOW moment! String is a AR showcase app, there are plenty on the app store and they really inspire some great writing opportunities. To see examples of this - click here.