A trip around the Earth...

As well as continuing to use the iPads in Maths and English lessons for starters, we have built the iPads into our IPC (International Primary Curriculum) lessons in the last few weeks. We have been learning about heroes and the children started by learning about past heroes and heroines including Florence Nightingale. One of their tasks was to use Google Earth on the iPads, to explore the places that Florence Nightingale visited. They found this task very interesting. One of the children made the comment that seeing the globe zoom out and move made them realise how far Florence travelled from England to the Crimean.

Initially we had some problems getting Google Earth to connect and the app kept hanging. We had to update the app and once we had done this it worked fine. It did highlight the need to check that apps are working before the lesson. With apps still being developed there can be quite a few bugs!

In another lesson the children designed superheroes and had to think about the special powers their superheroes would have. The children were give writing frames to work on but a group of children at a time had the chance to use either Superhero Creator or Make me a Superhero Lite to design their hero or heroine. Although this didn't take them long it got them enthusiastic about creating their super hero on paper.









 

These superheroes were created with Make me a superhero Lite. My criticism of this app is that there is a fairly limited amount that can be changed to personalise your superhero, however it does allow you to save your superhero. Perhaps the full version allows more variation.

In contrast, Superhero Creator has quite a lot that can be changed but does not have an external save function. The children could only view their heroes within the app. One workaround for this could be to take a screen shot (press the iPad's home button and power button at the same time).