Oscar is an Apple Distinguished Educator, speaking about exploring how the iPad can really help students learn and teachers teach. He helps teachers to get the most from their investment. Consider also, the paperless classroom.

Poetry and book reviews without paper. We begin by crowd sourcing a poem about the forest in autumn on Padlet which is lots of fun, with everyone putting up words on the big screen and then adding pictures. These can then be saved as pdfs which can be viewed in iBooks. On shared iPads these could be organised in collections for different classes.

Oscar moves on to Singing Fingers, to get younger students to think about letter sounds. It’s a combo of students putting fingers on the screen and speaking into the mic, allowing them to visualise letter sounds.

Type drawing – put a word in and then draw shapes with it. Word magnets – drag words around to create poems etc. – a more tactile way of manipulating language. Book creator – put together a book of text and pictures, audio files etc. These can be viewed through iBooks or on a PC via Chrome. Good for students to create something in class, or for teachers to put content together for lessons.

Book reviews without paper? Aurasma. Record a book review on the iPad that a activates when the iPad camera hovers over the book cover. Oscar shows us how quick and easy it is to set this up. It can be tied with a school account so that it’s totally private to the school.

Oscar then takes us through Explain Everything. Take a picture of a student’s work and then annotate/voice over the marking so that the assessment becomes more interactive. The video can be saved and then uploaded to YouTube or Foldr, a solution for sharing work via shared directories, for students to access. He doesn’t recommend emailing them out though because they can get quite big.

Wilts is running 4 half-day workshops with Oscar on teaching and learning with iPads for locals who’d like more training.