Useful Apps

MindShift has published some useful apps and a brief description of them. Please click here to visit the page.

Geoboard

 

Geoboard

Children can stretch bands around pegs to form line segments and polygons. They can make discoveries about perimeter, area, angles and fractions. This can be used with young children who are still doscovering properties of shapes, right up to intermediate phase children who are learning about congruence and angles.

Build a body

 

Build a body

 

This enables children to apply their knowledge of the body's major organ systems by choosing organs from the organ tray and then dropping them in the correct position within the body to build each system.

 

Sparklefish

 

 

 



Sparklefish

This is a funny audio story compilation that you can record voice ads, stories and many other audio clips. It is a good tool to get children to use correct parts of speech. This can be used in small group teaching, or as a whole class activity for application of parts of speech.

Timed Comprehension and Reading

Timed Reading & Comprehension Practice

This app allows readers practice fluency and comprehension. Each level consists of 5 short engaging stories for each Grade. It will you how many words per minute the reader is able to read, therefore marking improvement as the reader progresses. This would be useful in a one to one context.

Mental Maths

 Emma's Mental Maths

This is a fun way to improve mental maths skills! There are multiple levels to move up and you are only able to move up to a new level once you have mastered it. This is a great tool for early finishers in the classroom.

Fractions

 

 

K12 Equivalence Tiles

This is a very useful whole class teaching tool, or small group teaching tool.
The tiles let you compare the the values of fractions, decimals and percents up to 1 by using draggable tiles of varying values.

3D building blocks

Tap tap blocks

This is a great app to use as a whole class or in small groups. From an early age, children can build on the concept of perimeter and area.
Simply tap any block to add a new block to add at that spot. Rotate your 3D blocks with just one finger.

Investigating 3D shapes

Our Grade 5 maths class have been working with 3D shapes.  Have a look at their site to see how their teacher led them through a discovery process, reinforced their learning and provided resources.

‘Whacky Scientists’ investigate Solubility

Our Grade 5 class was asked to help the ‘Whacky Scientist’ investigate Solubility. The class was divided into groups of 3. Each group was led by the teachers and some experience Grade 11 scientist. Each group did some experiments to help them understand Solubility better. The boys used the technology of their choice to document the experiment. The resources and instructions were loaded on the website so that the boys could refer to them again and be able to access them from home. Have a look at the wacky website to see how they went about this.

Tablet concerns!

I recently visited Australia and Singapore and am inspired and excited by the things I learnt. More so than ever, I am convinced that technology, in the hands of a committed teacher, can enhance the learning and teaching process. Technology can help maximise the teacher-student contact time. What do the students already know? What am I trying to teach them and what tools are there to help make learning and teaching the content effective and engaging? Having said all that, there are things that we do need to be aware of to make sure that we use technology only where there is value add. This article highlighted some of the issues teachers face.

IPads in education

'Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time' --- ancient proverb. Have a look at this website, there are amazing resources here.

Using video in science

Show Me is an interactive white board app that allows me to demostrate a topic. While I am drawing, I can record myself explaining a topic and then I can share that video with my class - and with other classes too.
Tom Campbell

Educational Uses: Chris Groom

iPad: Educational Next Steps from Sally Bowes

Word and Excel and PowerPoint

Quickoffice Pro HD: A number of staff have asked me what I use for writing documents and for doing spreadsheet type work. To be honest, I don't really like using my iPad to write big documents (I'll use my computer for that) but it is nice to be able to edit the odd document or spreadsheet. Unfortunately this app isn't free but it does the job well and you get 3 apps in one.

SlideShare

SlideShare is fabulous for sharing presentations, documents, PDFs, videos and webinars- all available via a standard internet browser

K9 Web Protection Browser

K9 Web Protection Browser is a free safe browser. For families with small children, you are able to disable Safari and make K9 Web Protection Browser your default browser.