After spending the last couple of weeks getting acquainted with my Ipod Touch (and reacquainted with the students in my main placement), I'm noticing more and more ways in which the Ipod Touch can help differentiate instruction. There are quite a few "endearing quirks" that would benefit from different resources that some of these apps have to offer. While I'm not a huge fan of learning math through repetitious drill exercises, there are 1 or 2 students for whom their lack of speed with basic multiplication, division, addition and subtraction facts is significantly holding them back in learning new math concepts. The "Basic Math" app drills students on all basic math operations and could help these students improve on their accuracy and speed so that the rest of their work was hindered. This would be something they could work on while the class is finishing up on morning routines. The extra 10 or so minutes per day would help keep these facts fresh in their head.
I also have a student who is working on, in reading, reading fluently to help the text make more sense. When she reads aloud, she tends to plow through text with little attention to punctuation. The ability to read aloud, record herself and listen to those recordings could help her notice points in the text where she needs to speed up or slow down, hopefully improving her comprehension.
One student in my main placement struggles a lot with learning disabilities that affect her writing and especially her reading. She is constantly frustrated because her reading level is not near that of the rest of her classmates. She does, however, love writing and she and I have talked quite a bit about how she would much rather read books she writes herself. Her learning disability causes some difficulties with writing as well, but she loves to write and tell stories. Lately, I've been trying to think of a way to use her love of writing to help her reading as well. Using the Writer's Studio App, she would be able to create her own stories with pictures and then read them aloud as well.
....and she could use the Dragon Dictation app honest.. (it usually works really really well) to dictate her story, then drop it into a google doc and add photos or drop it into a more flexible platform on a regular computer.
ReplyDeleteHave you looked at Storykit app?
I really appreciated what you mentioned in this post about how helpful it would be for some students to have just a little more time each day to help their math facts root-in and speed-up a little. I was thinking of one student in particular I described in my recent post who has trouble engaging in math (therefore improving his math facts as well) and I think it might help him in the classroom community if he could use a math facts game app as an opportunity to improve in math and to teach others the game.
ReplyDeleteA Wave Learning
I hadn't heard of the Writer's Studio App, but I have played with the StoryKit app Jane mentioned, which I also talked about in my blog above, as I think it would help engage and motivate a multilingual student in my main placement classroom. I'd love to hear what your student thinks of either writing app if she gets a chance to try one.