iPad Implementation

 This week we finished off some work on game-based learning through Minecraft.  The end result being a blog post outlining the team work and planning required to accomplish an ambitious task (such as clearing terrain, building a large multi-room shelter in a few short hours, and coordinating resource and food gathering), connected to the teaching piece through the video of Joel Levin teaching his grade 2 class (shared last week).

I was excited to see some excellent cooperation, communication, and collaboration being applied as the teams designed their structures.

Now, we need to apply that to our real world tasks as assigned through TeamLab.

These screen shots were taken on day 1 of the project, and show some of the early development and planning.

Need better access to food?  Gardening.
A great teachable moment: survivors in Minecraft come to the same solution for a reliable food supply as early human societies.  Students just simulated the reason and cause for the invention of agriculture!
(and it wasn't part of the assignment to do this)

Structures of great scale and ambition require a lot of resources
and a lot of cooperation.

We then took to the library to help test out iPad apps, and ensure that we have a plan for providing the needed functionality and expertise to students in the ESL class for their Who Am I? digital storytelling project.

The project contains five key functionalities:

• The ability to record video
• The ability to take and customize photos
• The ability to create custom drawings and annotations
• The ability to record audio
• ... And the ability to publish all of it as a single rich digital book (we accomplished this through Pages)

Our task will be to create comprehensive "How To" guides for all of the tools, as well as for the iPad itself, and to provide support, guidance and expertise to students during their project (to be completed in December).  In order to accomplish our goal, we first tried out the apps.  Some worked as intended, others did not.  

In the end, the big winners were Pages, Educreations, and Doodlebuddy.  There was an additional app for voice recordings, should the creator opt for an audio-only narration over a video.

We spent Friday trying to create a project similar to the one the ESL students are to be assigned, but due to a lockdown interrupting things (and some distractions that need to be worked on: see right), we weren't able to complete a true exemplar that could be used to demonstrate what we can ultimately do with these devices.

I'll be marking the blogs over the weekend, so please make sure that you have all of your posts, including your lesson plan, up for me to grade.  I need to submit your interim evaluations on Tuesday.

Have a great Thanksgiving everyone!