Module 3: Learning with Apps

I liked playing with iTunes even though I've used it many times before. Now I've found out what all those cute little icons down the bottom were for! I especially liked iTunes U - and when I clicked on K-12 it opened a world of possibilities! Who knew there were all those things in Catholic Network Australia - or even that you could do a whole lots of professional learning through apps.

Aaaagh! Just blogged a whole lot and lost it all. Grrrr! Well what I had been saying was how there are so many apps out there and so little time to check them all out. So it's very good to find links to sites set up by people who have lists of  apps suitable for educational purposes. It's also good to talk to colleagues and swap ideas about suitable apps.

Great to have a framework for evaluating apps for classroom use but a couple of the frameworks were so complex I could have explored a whole lot more apps in the time it would take to read & decipher the form!! I think the 5 finger tool was the most user friendly one.

Looking at apps to fit into the ILe@RN Framework was very useful although I continued to find it difficult to find apps suitable for lower primary use. So many apps I found are good for very small children or upper primary onwards. Looking at the Framework:  Questioning Skills - had lots of fun with Skitch and could see it being able to be used by my Yr 2 students fairly easily. Communication & Collaboration Skills:

 Sock Puppets would be lots of fun and ideal for so many talking & listening skills. Creative Thinking Skills: Toontastic is really user friendly & has good help tools. Reflective Skills: I'm using Blogger right now for this reflection although I need to spend more time on it to figure out how to navigate through it more efficiently. Not something for lower primary students I don't think! Critical Thinking & Problem Solving Skills: need to look further to find suitable apps for younger students. Multimodal Literacy Skills: Love the Miss Spider apps! Very appealing for lower primary - user friendly, engaging. They tick quite a few boxes.

All in all I've enjoyed this module the most so far. I have a list of apps to investigate further and learnt a lot about how to narrow my search for appropriate apps & how to evaluate them. I think that the most effective tool for evaluating apps is going to be the students themselves - how easily they can navigate them, how interested they are in them & whether or not they find them challenging. Wish I had more time to play!