Over the last couple of years, Deputy Head and Geography teacher Chris Woodcock has been trying to develop strategies to support and challenge the low ability students he teaches.

Being a content heavy subject, these students struggle to recall the knowledge required to answer exam questions effectively, and as a result, they have been missing out on valuable marks. With this in mind, Chris wanted to develop a quick and easy strategy they could use to improve their recall of information. He has been doing this by using very simple diagrams as visual prompts.

So, having taught a topic, a simple diagram is used to summarise the main ideas. This can be easily memorised and then used to recall the main facts - an example follows:

The iPad camera has so much potential in classrooms, however the camera app itself is limited in its features. With his experience of using video apps with students, Nik Peachey lists the best ones for enabling teachers to add annotations and commentaries to recorded video, and use video for creating journals, storytelling and speaking practice.

One of the great things about mobile devices such as tablets, iPads and phones is that most modern devices have good quality cameras and microphones built in.

This opens up a really wide range of potential for communication and speaking practice that used to be such a struggle to organise on older laptops and desktop computers.

App developers have also been quick to exploit the potential of this powerful tool and in this post I'd like to look at some of the tools that have been created and how they can be used for language development.