Continuing our collaborative inquiry on ways to enhance students’ communication in mathematics, the kindergarten and grade 1 teachers at Anderson were introduced to the Book Creator app for the iPads last week.
I worked in four classes on Monday morning, beginning each class by showing the students the wordless book Shapes, Shapes, Shapes by Tana Hoban. The students could describe the shapes they saw in the photographs en francais if they were in the early french immersion kindergarten class or using English if they were in the other classes.
Next, I demonstrated how to take photographs with the iPad and the students were naturals! They each took a photograph of something in their classroom that had a shape of interest in it.
The students them worked in groups of 3 or 4 to then learn how to use their photographs and their voices to create an ebook using the Book Creator app. They were SO excited to hear their voices when we played back the narration they recorded for each page.
The ebooks can be emailed and shared as epub files and published on the iPads and iooks but I have yet to figure out if there is a way to embed this kind of file in a blog post. I can embed the photos for you but hearing the students’ voices is priceless. For example, when flipping the pages through the ebooks, you will see a little audio icon in the middle of the page, like in the following photograph. When you click on the icon, the recorded narration plays.
I made a short video of me viewing both french and english versions of the books through iBooks:
For young children, I think this is a great use of the iPad technology, using both the camera and audio recording features. The students “read” their books over and over again. Not one student hesitated in recording his or her voice…so this is an engaging way to nurture oral language use and to capture students’ language development.
~Janice