Tech trial triumph at St Nicholas

As many schools look to technology to help enhance the learning experience for children, the lucky year 5 students at St Nicholas are enjoying their lessons with Apple iPads in a two-term trial. The tablet devices have become popular in recent years and many schools are experimenting their usability – with the London preparatory school having some interesting results in some of their lessons.

Each year 5 student and teacher at St Nicholas has had access to their own iPad for the majority of their school day. Teachers will be incorporating the use of the iPad across all curriculum areas. Here are some of the success stories so far:

Music – The teacher, Miss Fyles, has been stirring up the creativity in her students with one of her topics looking at Brazilian Samba music. The class is exploring the how time and place can influence the way music is created, performed and heard. The class has been introduced to the world of Brazilian Samba and are now switching on their iPads to create some Samba themselves. Using Garageband, a music making application, they are composing their own Samba songs.

PSHE, French and 11+ - Teachers are taking the iPad and putting the learning in the hands of the students. Using the Keynote presentation tool, teachers are enabling students to present their ideas, report on some research and create interactive quizzes to test each other. Because the iPad and Keynote allow for integration of mixed media (images, sound, video, text), children can express themselves and their learning in a variety of ways.

“Our ICT provides instant access to high quality teaching materials online in a multimedia format. It enables personalised learning. As a tool for expressing thought and understanding, ICT provides a sophisticated array of flexible structures that enable children to reorganise their ideas and communicate them with an awareness of audience. ICT is engaging, inclusive, transformational and facilitates higher level thinking.”
St Nicholas ICT Vision Statement.

English – Teacher, Miss Townsend and the year 5 students, have been working on script writing and producing radio shows using some of the resources made available by the BBC. As well as using the iPads to write the scripts and include all of the relevant dramatic cues, the class is then recording their performances using a voice recorder application. The reaction to their recorded voice is significant and it allows children to hear for themselves how their scripts translate verbally.

Science – Science teacher, Miss Strachan, is motivating children by planning experiments to demonstrate the effects of sound waves. The students have learned about how sound travels and how the vibrations vary according to pitch and volume. Students have used their own musical instruments such as guitars and an app called oScope to visualise in real time how sound waves change as a result of high and low pitch and high and low volume. Children were able to take a screenshot and annotate the sound wave to highlight the differences between wave patterns.

PE - As well as participating in fitness circuits and using their iPads to record interviews with each other about how their body reacts to exercise, St Nicholas pupils are creating their own fitness circuit. Children worked in pairs creating an exercise station to be completed as part of a whole class fitness schedule. The children are photographing the different exercises, and then recording audio instructions for the station as well as written notes. All of these are put together in the Mental Note application to create an exercise station tutorial. They are explaining the activity, the purpose and the effect the exercise has on the body.

Jonathan Wyeth, Head of ICT at St Nicholas, is very pleased with the trial since its inception in January. He said: “So far the results are excellent. The students and staff have become ‘experts’ very quickly and they love having access to information at their fingertips. Across the whole curriculum students have already benefited from a range of learning applications that have complemented the outstanding teaching practice of our staff. As we are looking to evaluate the program over the next term, it is already easy for us to see the impact these devices are making in our classrooms and as we reflect on whether or not the iPad helps us live up to our vision statement - although I think the results are speaking for themselves.”