The Touch isn’t a device that lends itself to use from the front of the classroom. It’s real strength lies in providing access to data while pupils work independently. There are times though when instructions need to be delivered from the front, so this week we started to use the visualiser with the Touch. Above you can see the pupil’s working with teaching staff. This has made demonstrating/teaching with the Touch much easier.

At the beginning of the week the pupils worked with secondary NQT’s at the CLC. The idea was to show the NQT’s that secondary schools need to prepare for increasingly sophisticated IT users. The Friezland pupils still have 2/3 years before starting secondary school and demonstrated some weather and temperature research activities that they had carried out at school.

A few reflections whilst watching the pupils working this week -

• Some pupils are using two thumbs and others their index fingers. In a rapidly changing world what should teachers be advising? Does it matter? It did appear that the two thumb approach seemed to more productive for some pupils.

• Games - many ICT learning experiences for young learners are wrapped up in games. We’ve been using a range of free and 59p games. Most of the games for the Touch are not designed specifically for the classroom but some apps like Pop Maths and Broken Calculator have proved popular for Maths. The challenge is finding the time to experiment, but it is fun exploring!

• Managing the activities on the Touch - Because the device is small and crammed with apps, it is easy to be “off task”. Using iTunes to manage/load the Touches we are now looking at fine tuning the syncing so that staff can load only the apps and content that they need for specific projects. If this was a laptop/desktop computer this would involve a technician wiping and re-imaging the devices. With the Touch, the teacher can do this with a docking station. It could even be done over a lunchtime simply by selecting the appropriate apps and content in iTunes.