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Using Mobile Apps and Web 2.0 Tools to Improve the Teaching of Writing
- 1. Using Mobile Apps and Web 2.0 Tools to Improve the Teaching of Writing Scott Johnson Technology Integration Facilitator Qatar Academy (Primary)
- 2. How can we… • Develop creativity and critical thinking skills? • Facilitate collaboration? • Cater to diverse learning styles and needs? • Achieve a high level of student motivation?
- 3. Chuck the Talking Penguin’s Malfunctioning Time Machine
- 4. Guidelines / Learning Objectives • Perspective • Audience Awareness • Present Tense • Structure – Set the scene – Lose the iPod – Get the iPod back – Give the reader a choice
- 10. England 1609 As we suddenly open our eyes we see old, medieval castles and torn cottages with broken lanterns. We hear dogs howling loudly but still at a distance away and crickets making soft sounds. We see burned trees with only one or two leaves left and a mysterious, goldish green statue but its face is obscure when you're at a distance away. We smell rotten tomatoes and dark green radish. We hear tortured people within the castle walls and creaking doors. We see black crows circling around the castle. We sense thunderous waterfalls and fast-flowing rivers. As we explore within the castle, we encounter skeletal guards with a sharp bladed knife.They suddenly snatch the iPod. They start chasing us with the element of surprise. We run towards a fast-flowing river and take a giant leap to get to the other side. As the guards take a small leap they fall into the river and to a waterfall. We suddenly see the iPod flowing on a river but luckily it doesn’t fall into the waterfall. We see it flow deep into the castle and into a dungeon, we take a step into the castle and hear a muffled scream.
- 18. Guidelines / Learning Objectives • Perspective • Audience Awareness • Present Tense • Structure – Set the scene – Lose the iPod – Get the iPod back – Give the reader a choice
- 34. Web and Laptop Tools - Google sites - Google docs - iMovie - Domo Animate iPad Apps - Epic Citadel - Comic Life - iMotion HD
- 35. Questions?
Editor's Notes
- Hi my name’s Scott Johnson. I work at Qatar Academy, and I’m one of theTechnology Integration Facilitators in the Primary School. That means I get to work right across the Primary School – from 3 year olds up to 11 year olds – supporting teachers in using technology with their students. This presentation today is focused on how technology can help improve the teaching of writing. And what I’d like to do is show a few examples of creative ways in which teachers are using technology to (address) these questions.
- …In writingAlthough the examples I’m sharing have been used in a primary school setting, they would all be at least as effective, if not more so, in senior school classes. Now I’m aware that we have people with a wide range of different roles in the room. The ideas I’m sharing have all come from a primary school setting, however they can all be used very effectively with senior school students. So, the first thing I’d like to (share) involves a talking penguin called Chuck and his malfunctioning time machine...
- This is a project I helped some of our grade 4 classes with last year. It’s a novel that the whole class worked together on. They presented it using google sites, and it’s a pick-a-path story…
- The first time I did this project with a class, they were highly motivated…
- Epic Citadel is a free app – it was designed by Epic Games as a marketing tool – they just wanted to show off what they can do. So the app is this medieval landscape that you can navigate around by using the touch (screen).
- Which makes it perfect as a stimulus for writing.
- It sets the scene and leaves them to come up with the plot. And because it is so visually stunning, it really gets students thinking about which words they will use to describe it.
- So in this particular lesson, we started by explaining that the first chapter of our Chuck Story had just ended, and that Chuck and the reader had pressed the ‘Back’ button. There is a flash of blinding light. As it starts to fade, you cautiously blink your eyes open and see… At this point we connected an ipad to the board and showed them a scene from epic citadel. We spent 5 minutes simply talking about all they could see in that one scene. Then we gave them the ipads with epic citadel open– one between 2 – and let them explore the app for 10 minutes. I brought the class back together for a bit of shared writing, and then sent them away to write their own pieces of writing in pairs. What I really loved about this lesson was just how excited the students got about vocabulary. This was a whole class of local students, with English as a second language, and they were really extending themselves with their word choice – taking risks, asking me questions like “does the word ‘vast’ make sense here?” or “is skeletal a word?”
- So in this particular lesson, we started by explaining that the first chapter of our Chuck Story had just ended, and that Chuck and the reader had pressed the ‘Back’ button. There is a flash of blinding light. As it starts to fade, you cautiously blink your eyes open and see… What I really loved about this lesson was just how excited the students got about vocabulary. This was a whole class of local students, with English as a second language, and they were really extending themselves with their word choice – taking risks, asking me questions like “does the word ‘obscure’ make sense here?” or “what exactly does ‘vast’ mean?
- Here’s one of the better examples. I mentioned that the writing was done in pairs. We are lucky enough at our school to have a 1 to 1 laptop program from Grade 2 up. And starting in Grade 2, the students all get Google Apps accounts, and they start learning how to use google docs (or google drive as it’s now called), blogger, and picasa web albums. This piece of writing was done on google docs, which allowed the two students to each be writing at the same time. Who’s familiar with google docs? Right, so I won’t talk to much about it, other than to say it’s brilliant for allowing really effective collaboration in writing. And of course when students work together on writing, they get to talk about it as they go – play around with how the words sound and bounce ideas off each other. It makes them a lot more reflective, because they are checking up on each other. They’re also learning a lot from each other.
- Here’s a brief screen recording of two students working together on a document – again it’s 2 local grade 4 boys. It’s a bit tricky to understand, but listen to the way they are discussing ideas, and watch the two cursors moving around the document. It’s not really the best example, but hopefully it’s enough to give you an idea of how effective google docs can be. One of the cool things about having students create a story on a google sites is that it can incorporate (different) types of media.
- For example, we took two lower ability writers, gave them an ipad with the comic life app on it, sent them down to one of our pre school classes that were learning about pirates – the kids were out of the room – but it had pirate stuff everywhere. With ipad in hand they set to work creating their own comic as a chapter to be part of their Chuck story. This (app) is really cool
- This app is really cool. It gives you the basic template to start from. In each of the boxes you can see there is a camera icon. If you click on that, you can take a photo and that photo goes straight into the box. You then add speech marks, titles, text boxes etc. So (here's) what they came up with
- Now if we go (back) to the guidelines that we set the students...
- you can see that even though these students have used a different form of media, they have still achieved most of the guidelines. The only one they didn’t quite master was writing from Chuck’s perspective. Now poor old Chuck the talking (Penguin) had a bit of a bad run with pirates last year.
- In this chapter, Chuck and the reader find themselves in the Bermuda Triangle, where they encounter another pirate. This chapter was also inspired by Tim Ryland’s visit. Who knows of Tim Rylands? His biggest claim to fame is using computer games as a prompt for writing. He did a lesson with our students where he led them around the landscape in this game and drew out lots of language from the students, before giving them pen and paper and having them write descriptions of the scene. The writing they came up with was so good that they wanted to add it to their pick-a-path stories. And then I helped one small group of students put together this green screen video…So they stuck a ruler to the back of Chuck, and one of the students crouched down off screen and used him as a puppet. And then they filmed them in front of a green wall that we have in our IT lab, and used the green screen function in imovie. If your school doesn’t have a green wall somewhere, I highly recommend getting some green paint and sorting it out. Green screen movies are really easy to make and we’ve been getting heaps of use out of it!For example, when Grade 3 students (learnt) about deforestation last year...
- So this can put a bit more of a creative spin on writing information reports. Another tool that’s really good for that (purpose) is Domo Animate
- I should point out that it only took 15 minutes to teach the Grade 2 students how to use this tool. Still on the subject of creative ways to do information reports…Our Grade 5 students last year did a unit focusing on famous people in history. Toward the end of the unit, the students each chose one person to research in depth and then shared that information with the class. And we offered them some tools and then gave them choice in how they presented.
- It allows you to create a pretend facebook profile. She studied Che Guevara and so created this pretend facebook page for him – and used this to explain the timeline of his life. She also dressed up as him (as you can see), presented in Spanish because that was his native language and had a friend translate, and had a question and answer session with the class.
- This girl studied Albert Einstein. She was very shy, so she used this program to create a talking avatar of Einstein. And of course...
- ----- Meeting Notes (10/17/12 21:21) -----And (one) last thing…
- This is a project we did with a Grade 1 class last year. They were learning all about story-telling – the structure of stories and the different ways in which stories can be told.So to hook them in, and to kick-start their imaginations, we got the students to makemovie trailers.
- ----- Meeting Notes (10/17/12 21:26) -----… this setting was then used as the (backdrop) for a stop motion video
- they got the ipads out and used an app called iMotion HD to create stop-motion videos. They used old DVD cases as stands to keep the ipads still, and then took over 50 photos of the characters, moving them very slightly between photos. When you play it back, it plays the photos in very quick succession, giving the impression that the characters are moving. Stop-motion isn’t a particularly new concept, but doing it with the ipads makes the process a lot easier. Finally, the latest version of iMovie has trailer templates that you can put your video clips into to easily create something that looks quite professional. (Here’s) an example of one.