Tablets in the classroom are now ubiquitous so this week we have lots of entertaining and engaging suggestions for incorporating tablets into your lesson plans. If you’re looking for something you can do as a collective, perhaps in relation to a specific project, try putting together a class blog. Many teachers use blogs as a way of sharing resources, but if you want your students to get involved too, try Easy Blog Jr for younger kids or Blogsy or Google’s Blogger for older students (the last option does require a Google account). If you want to add pictures, to your blog or to any other project, try Pic Collage for Kids or PicLab. These let kids add things like filters, captions or effects, and can be used as part of a group project.
Coding can be taught to students of a surprisingly young age. Apps like Cargo-Bot, Hopscotch, Tynker, Lightbot and Move the Turtle, all make great use of music and visuals to make coding accessible and fun. If you want the class to get musical, try ABC Music or Animal Band for younger students, or GarageBand, Music Studio or Caustic 3 for teens. Almost no musical experience or aptitude is necessary to use these programs, yet the software is of professional quality and allows easy composition.
All tablets come with some kind of voice and video recording software, so why not have your kids make a podcast or video about a project, instead of getting them to write yet another essay. This skills are becoming increasingly important, not only for the professional world, but also at university, where students are now required to present work through more accessible, non-traditional means. Voice Recorder Free, Smart Voice Recorded and Cubasis can be acquired to supplement existing recording software if you have the budget for them.
Apple Maps, Google Maps and Google Earth are perfect for cartographical exercises when teaching geography, and a physics class can easily be livened up with SkySafari 5, Star Walk Kids, SkyView Free and GoSkyWatch Planetarium. If you’re a language teacher, Seesaw has a wealth of resources included and also allows students to track their progress, while vocabulary training can be enhanced with FlashStick, Duoling or Google Translate (which has been vastly improved in recent years). For art teachers, try Book Creator or ComicBook!, both of which help students work on writing, drawing and design skills. They are also useful in English classes for teaching certain types of text. While a small financial outlay is necessary for some of these programs, we’re confident that you, and your students, will definitely think it’s worth it when you become the teacher with the best and most tech-savvy lessons in the school.
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