The iPad and Early Childhood Education

I do think tablets are a game changer for education. Moreover I think the rules for early childhood education  will change the most. No longer having access tied up in a mouse or keyboard cord.

When I watch my 3 year old, or any toddler on an iPad, I am just amazed. They have access to a wealth (that is if they are lucky enough to be born in a family with enough wealth) of information and literacy practices.

The possibilities are endless. I just hope to highlight three: science ed, music ed, and writing.

Science Education




In pre-school my son is currently studying the solar system. It just happens to be one of the topics he latched on to with a passion. Its one of what James Gee so aptly titled an "island of knoweldge" for my son.

John has recently become enamored with the iLearn Solar Systems app  on the ipad. There is information about each planet and satellite. John skips over these and goes right to the quizzes. Over time he has tried enough that he starts to remember some of the esoteric facts. All this to hear an animated alien make the most annoying sound in the Milky way.

Music Ed


When John and I were traveling on the train he wrote his first song using Garage Band. We discussed how all music is patterns. He created a song with a violin, cello, guitars. The pattern he chose was more alphabetical than musical. John then added some drums. I lost the song he made, and boy do those multitrack songs eat up memory.

Luckily today though he didn't want to sing a song. Just wanted to JAM.


Writing


In early childhood writing instruction usually revolves around three basic components. Letter formation,  inventive writing through drawing, and oral language. I use an app called magnetic alphabet for John to practice his oral storytelling. This is turn will help to improve not only his writing but also his reading compehension (I also use the app to practice onsets and rimes and phoneme manipulation but that is for another post). In the meantime enjoy the tale of the buses versus the garbage truck.

Using Picture Books on the iPad

Picture Books


I have always been an advocate more picture books in the classroom. As a sixth grade teacher I relied on picture books as a cornerstone of my curriculum.

For example I'd use picture books, such as The Wretched Stone to explicitly teach and model new comprehension strategies. I would model and have students make inferences as we tried to unravel what happened to the crew.

 I would also use picture books to build background knowledge for novels we read set in our turbulent past to allow students to build background knowledge, well  more empathy than knowledge, on subjects such as genocide, racism, and slavery. In my sixth grade class we read Sounder every year. My students struggled with the tribulations of sharecropping and Jim Crow so I would use picture books about slavery, civil rights and Jim Crow. I would then create my own picture books using images of sharecroppers found online.

Picture Books on the iPad


I thought the iPad would be a perfect tool for sharing picture books. So when I was prepping my lesson on using picture books I hopped right on to the itunes store and into the children's section.

I was dismayed.

Most of the titles I found in the store were garabage of the supermarket variety. Most of the titles were connected to children's TV shows. None of the classic picture books have been made available or atleast were easy to find. I searched by titles and author.

 I am sure this has to do with publishers, authors, and illustrators trying to figure out digital royalties, but it saddened me to know that for many of today's readers the classics are not available.

Luckily I was able to purchase The Keeping Quilt by Patricia Polacco. It is a story of a Jewish family that has passed down a keepsake for generations.

Using the iPad for picture books was a natural fit. I was able to zoom in on pictures when we wanted to analyze illustrations and zoom in on words as we read.

The story itself was fantastic for my pre-service teachers who really witnessed the power of using picture books to learn about other cultures compared to a text book.


I have a quick clip of some of the activities we completed as a class.

Add Hyperlinks to Keynote on the iPad

Add Charts to Keynote on the iPad

Creating Screencasts on the iPad

I have been spending some wonderful time with teachers doing professional development associated with using iPads. One of my biggest challenges is the lack of screencasting. I now have a solution. Reflection.

Reflection ($15.00) allows you to mirror your ipad or iphone to your computer.

Creating Tutorials

Projecting from iPad


The other benefit of Reflection is untethered projection. This will allow you to use apps like Screenchomp, Showme, or Educreations as an interactive whiteboard. It is not as robust as an Apple TV but the price of an iPad and the fifteeen dollars for Reflection you can have an IWB for thousands less than the major brands.

Using the iPAD Screenchomp to support Informational Text in the Elementary Classroom

Supporting Informational Text


Those familiar with my blog know that I have long advocated for more informational texts in the elementary classroom. I start my children's literature with Nell Duke's seminal study which highlighted the 1.6 minutes a day students in first grade interacted with informational text.

Thus, I was excited to see the focus on the 70/30 split on informational and narrative texts in the Common Core. By balancing all of the content areas with a  close to 60/40 or 50/50 split in ELA students will develop analytical reading and writing skills.

I do not, however, support the idea that the only way to support the use of informational texts is through close reading or that we should severely limit pre-teaching texts. It seems some Common Core supporters have forgotten the most important maxim that the standards tell us "What to teach, not how to teach."

Thus I will always introduce my teachers to the idea of before, during, and after reading activities to build the practices employed by good readers. I will also teach them to draw on the principals of explicit instruction, modeling, and guided practice. Why would we ignore thirty years of reading comprehension research?

Using Technology to Support Informational Text


I am also a big proponent of using technology to make the teaching and assessment of reading comprehension for effective and efficient. Recently this passion has lead to my involvement in many iPad initiatives.

For sometime the impediments of using classroom sets of iPad outweighed the benefits. The product was too new for the workflow to be in place that is changing. Many classrooms can now use the iPad to not only support the use of digital texts and tools but to build foundational literacies skills.

One great app I use is Screenchomp, from Camtasia. It turns your ipad into an interactive whiteboard (in fact instead of spending thousands on IWBs schools should just get an Apple TV and an iPad..more on that later).

In the latest update you can now import PDFs from dropbox. This was a watershed moment for me. Teachers could model the reading of informational texts and share them with students. Students could complete collaborative think alouds and reflect on the strategies they used. The potential is there (you could also use this with Classic literature from gutenberg.org.

Steps to using Screenchomp for think-alouds


1. Choose a background from dropbox.

2. Open a pdf

3. Center the piece. This is the one drawback. As far as I know you can only look at one page of a PDF at a time in Screenchomp. However, you can scroll up and down using two fingers. So just make sure the texts you choose are one page long, or know that you will have to record each page seperatley.

4. Record your think-aloud:

Add Narration to Keynote on the iPad