At the start Term 2, Year 5 and 6 students in Room 3 at Lakeview School were given an iPod Touch to use in class. Here Tim Nelson explains the thinking behind the initiative and the outcomes so far. The whole process started as an appraisal discussion between me, the school principal, Ed Hodgkinson, and my appraiser, Tim White. We were looking for a project I could really get my teeth into that was exciting and would have a significant input into teaching and learning at Lakeview School. Literacy has been a focus here for some time and a goal was set to use mobile devices to improve reading outcomes for students. The next step was to choose a teacher who would like to take on the responsibility of leading the initiative on a day-to-day basis. After discussing the idea with the other...   more

  Husband and wife Glen and Monique Storey are teachers at Te Akau ki Papamoa School. In their spare time they’ve been working on iOS apps for kids they work with and have just released their first one, StoryBot. The idea for StoryBot came from working with one of my students who has Down’s Syndrome. I needed a way that he could engage with sentence structure, essential words and reading. The aim of the app is to help learners build sentences and ‘experience’ shared stories by interacting with them. It’s a way for them to engage in text and co-construct written experiences. We’ve seen it work really powerfully with Year 0-4 students and learners who have special needs. However, as it turns out, StoryBot’s proving to be a really...   more

  The red carpet was out and the TVNZ reporter was was live on air with newly-published young authors at Waiau Pa School. The launch of the collaborative fan fiction novel Fuel To The Fire was a fitting finale to a special project, writes David Kinane. For several years now I have been encouraging teachers to use FanFiction.Net as a resource for a collaborative reading and writing project. It has thousands of stories written by students who want to continue the books they love – there are more than 600,000 Harry Potter-related stories and 200,000 based on Twilight! The site not only provides a real audience of passionate critics but also gives teachers a rich resource to draw from to provide examples of writing for their students to use to hone their own literacy...   more