Ibooks

The 2/1 children have been making ibooks today using book creator. It is a great little app that we managed to get for half price - £2.49

You can make the books really easily, adding photos and content quickly.

We experimented with colour and made our headings stand out.

We hope to share them with the world soon in ibooks!

Ipad site for nsix account holders

If you are a Norfolk teacher or child, then you should have an nsix account. I have created a site within this that you can access, called ipads. Click on the photo below and sign in to access the site.

Purchases

After writing the last post I thought it might be helpful to list some of the purchases we made at Roydon.

• ipads - roughly £311 each


• ipad cases - £6 each (we found a company on Amazon and made a deal)


• Apps - we have spent around £25 so far


• Mini mac server - Aprox £500

Our Mac server

Synching and organising apps is easy if you have a computer that acts as a server, although it can be done without through the cloud.

We had a computer at school in the staff room that we were going to use, but needed to upgrade it with more memory to make it run smoothly. On advice from our technicians, we then decided to invest in a mini mac server. We had a generous offer from the Friends of Roydon Primary School to purchase the server and also cases for all ipads.

The first two weeks - glitches and greatness!

The first couple of weeks have been filled with app finding and spending time organising them. The synching of apps is a wonderful thing, but it does take time sifting through to ensure the quality. If a teacher installs an app then realises it is poor quality, they delete it straight away. In the meantime it has appeared on all the other ipads. With 11 teachers installing apps, we quickly had over 200 to organise on each ipad.

Organising apps

Because the apps we want to use are different for year groups and key stages, each class is organising their own apps. To put apps into folders, you hold one down until they wobble, then you can move them around freely. If you put an app on top of another, it creates a folder which you can name. If you click the cross in the corner, it kisses the app goodbye (though of course it is still available in the app store). Simple!

There may be times when a class asks to borrow all ipads for whole class work. If the app they want is not showing, the teacher can access it from the app store, in the 'purchased' section (bottom of screen). All apps associated with the account can be found there.

What an exciting delivery!

We made a huge decision just before Christmas to invest some of our techology money into purchasing ipads for our school. They were delivered at the very end of term, much to our delight.

We had thought very carefully about how many we were going to buy and how they were going to be used. After seeing them being used at Kenninghall primary, we moved away from our initial thoughts about how they were going to be organised.

We have moved away from the traditional timetabling of laptops, to allocating 4 to each class. This enables them to be used every lesson for group work. At some times classes may want a few more, so they would first ask their teams to borrow theirs. There may be occasions that whole class ipad use is needed. There will be a 'request' system in place for this.

The arrival of the laptops coincided with the appontment of digital leaders in our school, so althoughI managed to open one, their first job was to unbox the rest, ready for security tagging.