Consolidating new information can be a very difficult process for students, particularly if they don't understand the main elements of a fact or concept. Using the iPad combined with suitable apps that are flexible enough to cater for their creative and imaginative minds, however, students are given full control over the subject from researching it to sharing and presenting it to the class.
When it comes to learning new knowledge and facts relating to a topic, it can sometimes be tricky to find tasks that help children share their learning so that they retain the information.
I have seen many lessons and work in books that just seem to involve research and simply copying it into books. I always question how much knowledge the children can recite from this approach.
The iPad is now transforming the way children demonstrate their learning and recently a class of Year 2 children have been using different approaches relating to the same topic of animals in the Savannah to show how these activities are making the new found knowledge stick.
We first started by generating questions that we wanted to find out: What? Where? Why? How? We had to finish those sentences and share with others on their tables and with the class to build up a list of questions that we wanted to answer. As a class we decided to firstly focus on the Cheetah. We then had some time to research on the internet to try and find answers to our questions.