Posters made with PicCollage

PicCollage is one of my favourite apps to use in the classroom. It can be used in so many ways. Essentially it is a poster creating app. You can use your own photos or pictures from the web ( you can turn the web function off too which is handy). Text can be added and manipulated. Here are some of the ways I've used this app with 6year olds.

• Poster about school holidays that included photos of holiday and text recounting their holiday experiences
• Follow up reading activity, one group created a poster about Mount Everest with facts and pictures.
• As a maths homework task students had to photograph 3D shapes around their house and label them
• For science students created a healthy eating poster that had to include a healthy eating message and these were displayed around the school

I have found that students will create their own posters at home and email them to me. I recently had this Christmas themed one sent to me.

My latest app find is ThingLink. It is an app but also web based. You can sign up free as an educator and input your students without them needing their own email addresses. The app is easy to use and has so many possibilities. Links are created around a base image and these links may be images, text, video, audio. Here is an example one of my year 6 students created about Grace Kelly.

QR codes to support and differentiate reading activities

 Using this site to create QR codes www.visualead.com I was able individualise a simple comprehension activity to support a book one of my reading groups was reading. The QR code links to a website about Mount Everest, and asks the students to answer simple questions about the topic. The QR code is printed and taped to the back of the book so that students can scan it once they have read the book. 

QR codes in Science

We recorded our ideas about erosion using Croak.it! and then embedded them into QR codes and displayed them as part of our Science Fair display.  There are a number of QR code generators online that are free to use. I use:qrstuff.com or Kaywa.com

Mother's Day Cards

We made Mother's Day cards and recorded a message using the Croak it! App. We embedded our message onto a qr code which we printed and attached to the back of our cards.

App classroom poster

My students can sometimes get distracted by games, so I have created this poster so that they know what they are allowed to access during reading time.

QR codes

There are many websites that you can go to in order to create your own QR codes.  The one I use is:
http://www.qrstuff.com/ You can embed text or an URL. In the above example, the QR code takes my class of 6 year olds to a child friendly website on the Monarch butterfly.

Below is an example of how I make websites we use regularly easy for my students to access on their ipads, by using QR codes on the walls of my classroom.

Here I have used a QR code to enable students to follow up a reading lesson on Shipwrecks. The website is about the Titanic which they took a particular interest in when reading.  I found this was also a good way of extending my more able students.

After reading a book about Asteroids, students had to scan codes that took them to information about Asteroids that they then had to glean facts from.