This has been a busy term having my own class but also using part of my management day to work in Room 1 showing the year 1 learners and their teacher how to use Explain Everything and its many tools.
It is important for the learners to go into next year where they will be year 2 with some basic iPad skills.
The ones I deemed important are:
How to hold and move with the iPads: hug hold, always hold in your lap if on the mat and leave on a desk when not in use. How to put it on charge and remove it from charge without damaging any chords.
Basic skills: How to find and navigate their class site, how to swipe and clear iPad after using it, how to take a photo using their camera, how to access apps on their iPads not on their class site.
Explain Everything: how to open and EE link, start a new EE, give an EE a title, upload to their drive. We also worked on taking a photo and changing the background colour, accessing the pencil and draw tool and how to add more slides.
The learners are picking up these skills really fast and are attempting to help their teacher become more adept at using them. The concern I have is that over time, less time is being spent mastering these skills during the week thus only leaving them using EE's on a Thursday. One way I could tackle this is to make EE's and add to the class site allowing learners an opportunity to hone their skills over the course of a week.
Whether this will be bough will only be determined next year when they move onto a new class and they are able to use the basic skills taught without the teacher having to reteach it.
