Recent Updates: Success of iPad Integration!

In what follows, I'll share some modest--and recent--uses of the iPad in the English classroom that highlight the streamlined and integrated use of certain apps over the last few months in my classroom!

• Interactive Photography: I created a Haiku discussion forum with multimedia integration. Students were tasked during class time to snap a picture with the iPad that represents a theme in a Shakespearean sonnet. Then, they uploaded the image directly to the discussion forum with a brief explanation. Finally, they commented on one another's responses. 

• Book Reviews: Students were tasked to present book reviews of independent reading assignments to one another using video presentation. Using their iPads, students took videos of themselves reviewing their books. They shared those videos with me and then I uploaded them to a single Haiku page. During class, students brought headphones, watched one another's reviews, and posted comments to one another's videos on a discussion board on the Haiku page. 

• Shakespeare Study: I ran my entire Shakespeare unit this semester with the complementary use of Shakespeare in Bits, a robust Shakespeare app. Students used the app for independent reading with guiding questions; they also used it as a complement during classroom review. The app is absolutely amazing: it has a full, original, and annotated text alongside real-time animation/dramatization.

• Vocabulary Instruction: My students have found Membean, a differentiated vocabulary learning system, to be an engaging method for vocabulary instruction. I've integrated this easily into regular iPad classroom use: students are expected to complete 30 minutes/week (on their own time) studying and reviewing new vocabulary words on Membean. During class, they are allowed a 10 minute refresh-session, after which they take a quiz generated via my release. (N.B. While Membean is not an app, it presents and runs like an app, and students need less than one minute of log-in and start time to start running a review session).