
Using iPads to Build Literacy Skills in the Primary School Classroom
Easily Differentiate and make Learning Accessible with iPad built-in tools
The iPads have many built-in features that make learning more accessible such as Dictate, Voice Record, Text to Speech and the in-built Dictionary Tool. Personally, I have witnessed so many students who struggle to put pen to paper because of a variety of difficulties produce amazing work with an iPad. Using these tools, students can more easily produce a much higher standard of work while also learning new skills on the iPad, which gives them a great confidence boost.
In this tutorial, I demonstrate how to make Reading more accessible using the Audio Feature in Keynote on iPad
Best iPad Apps to Built Literacy Skills
Using Pages on iPad - Templates to scaffolding learning and literacy skills
The Apple app Pages is one of my favourite iPad apps. It is a great starting point for both teachers and students when teaching literacy skills. Pages comes with several pre-loaded templates which are a great way of scaffolding learning and literacy skills and they also students to hit the ground running and save time. Pages is a very flexible creative environment that supports your students to become more confident and competent content creators by allowing them to customise fonts, personalise text styles and easily add graphics, voice recordings and videos to their work.
Templates to assess learning or create eBooks, posters or newsletters for your school website
Flyers and Poster templates are also very useful templates to be used during literacy stations. These templates can be used to create character profiles or review events that students are reading about in their reading station, or to design a cover or illustration for a story.
As a reflection and assessment tool, the Newsletter
templates within Pages are also very useful. Students can use these to create a
newsletter to reflect on what they are learning in their classroom, to report
on an event that happened in a story they are reading, or to create a school
newsletter.
In this tutorial, I demonstrate how to use Pages templates on iPad to create a class or school newsletter
Using Clips on iPad
Creative activities to build students' literacy skills
There are endless ways you can use Clips in the classroom for teaching literacy skills. Students can use Clips to add and edit videos and photos to create character profiles, fact videos about topics from a book of facts, create a summary video for a story, create a book review video, spelling videos, letter sound videos, create a video on new vocabulary….the possibilities are endless!
In this tutorial, I demonstrate how to use Clips on iPad to build students' creativity and literacy skills