a Day in the life of an ipad teacher
How can an iPad be used to enhance the school day? Which apps are the best? Nick Dempster, a Year 6 teacher at Linaker Primary School in Southport and an Apple Distinguished Educator shares his experiences.
Teamviewer. This will allow you to see and manipulate your laptop screen from your iPad. Simply open up SIMs on your laptop, connect your iPad and - as long as you have an internet connection - you can fill in your register from anywhere. 09:30am – Literacy
There are so many potential uses of an iPad for reading and writing that I am going to 08:00am - Before school focus on a particular practice that I use every week. Being in Year 6, there is a big push for The iPad is out and making itself useful long preparing for the end of year SATs, and the before the children arrive. All my plans and iPads have massively enhanced this process. I resources are saved to the cloud, so I use my regularly e-mail out reading materials to the iPad to print out anything that is needed for children to read outside of class, which allows the day. It is so much quicker to access your more time to focus on answering questions files this way than waiting for a PC or pen during lessons. I also promote purposeful drive to load up. There are so many different writing through the iPads - children are cloud based platforms to use nowadays, able to write book reviews which are then many of which are free and have their own published online. In the past we have done app to make accessing your files very smooth this on booksellers’ websites, but next year I and painless. At the moment I use Microsoft intend to use the iBook store review section Skydrive as our school’s e-mail system is in the same way. based on there. There are many alternatives that are just as good though - Dropbox, 10:30am - Wet break Google Drive and iCloud, to name a few. As a child, I hated wet breaks. All of the 08:45am – Registration board games were missing pieces and the other option of “sit and draw something” The children arrive on the playground and became tiresome very quickly. It is not a spend 10 minutes outside before heading problem any more though, as wet breaks are in for lessons. I’ve always disliked calling an opportunity to be creative with the iPads. names on the register - so much wasted Some children are creating animations, others time! There are now ways around this. I use are designing games on Sketch Nation. There an app called Emerge HD to access all our are a few lads having tournaments on the electronic registers on our SIMS anywhere, chess app, whilst a couple of children have so mine is completed before the children shared pictures and are creating a collage even enter the classroom. It is very intuitive with them. And I am in the centre of them all, but can be quite expensive for schools to in awe of their imaginative pursuits! adopt. A cheaper alternative is to use a remote desktop app such as Splashtop or www.innovatemyschool.com
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