Friday, May 22, 2015

Tschüss iPads!


Since our students will all receive a tablet computer next school year, we are saying good-bye to our iPads in a few days.  They will be going to the middle and elementary schools, which have had iPads for a few years but aren't quite 1-1 yet.

We got our iPad carts about a year and a half ago.  We have had two carts for the eight world languages teachers to share, so we don't have them all the time, but I was usually able to get them most days that I wanted to use them.  

The most useful app on them was definitely Quizlet.  A lot of mastering another language is learning the vocabulary, and there's really no good way to do that other than just to practice.  The Learn mode in Quizlet, which prompts students in English and asks them to type in the word in German, is an effective way to do this.  When they get a word wrong, it shows them the correct spelling, and then they type it in again, which helps them commit the correct spelling to memory.

I also used the iPads for Kahoot, which most of the students love.  It's a fun way to do a quick 10-15 minute review.

I tried going paperless on a few assignments using Google Docs.  When students had a writing assignment, they typed their final draft on the iPad and submitted it to me digitally.  This worked quite well, and I plan to use it more in future years.  

I love the website LearningApps.org but the activities I created sometimes didn't work smoothly on the iPads.  I'm hopeful that this will work better next year on the laptops.


No comments:

Post a Comment