Week 8 - Apps Informal Blog

This blog post is relating back to last week’s seminar on exploring apps on the iPad to be creative within literacy.

Throughout the seminar the exploration of different apps was present. O’Brien (2013) has recognised that the essence of stories we tell remain the same but the ways in which we can now share these stories have changed dramatically with the development of digital communication technologies. This has been present through looking at the first app on the iPads to create a book was Book Creator. Book Creator serves to be simple for children to use their creativity to create a book. The great potential which I saw in it was that I could see the huge potential it can have with many books types, for example - children’s picture books, photo books, art books, cook books, manuals and textbooks. Book Creator had many different features which would engage and motivate children. The adding photos aspect, text, hyperlinks, soundtracks are all huge opportunities for children to use within Book Creator to use their ICT skills as well as their literacy skills. Bull (2010) has documented that schools need a balanced and school-wide approach to the teaching of literacy and multimodal texts. From using Book Creator it has shown me the huge possibility that this app has in the primary classrooms. It has shown me that apps like this which can serve the purpose of telling a story can be exceedingly beneficial for children within the engagement and motivation in which children would acquire.

A further app that we looked at in the seminar was Puppet Pals which in a group of 4 we created an animation. This app has the great prospective for children to create high quality cartoons from their imaginations. The other potentials which I saw with this app for teachers is that it could engage children through a variety of ways, from allowing children to act out historical events to delivering a book report. This app was extremely fun, accessible and very easy to use. The only problem I had with this app is that it only lets you have a certain amount of characters which isn't very good when children are trying to incorporate a variety of characters.

This seminar has showed me a variety of apps which can be used within the primary classroom for literacy. I have never had the opportunity to go to a school where iPads have been present, especially in literacy, however due to this seminar in future practices I now have a wide range of apps to draw upon and use. Being an ICT specialist I can see the huge potential which apps bring to the classroom to engage and motivate children in literacy.

Bibliography

Bull, G. (2010). Helping teachers to explore multimodal texts. Research into leaders in education. Vol 8 (3).

O’Brien, M. (2013). Creating Multimodal Texts. Retrieved from: <http://creatingmultimodaltexts.com/>  [Accessed on 11/03/2014].