Smashing Apps: Creativity Special for the Festival of Learning

   

Join myself, Jacob Woolcock, along with Laura Hilltout, Eoin Hughes and Faye Ellis as we discuss some of our favourite creative lessons to teach using iPad. We'll share ideas, top tips and plenty of inspiration to get you exploring iPad in a whole new way in your classroom!

Watch now: https://youtu.be/KaW2dfF4_1U

Between us we've shared four creative, dynamic and cross-curricular lesson ideas that can fit alongside your own teaching sequence. Below you'll find out more details about each of these lessons.

One Chord Groove with Eoin Hughes

In this musical masterclass Eoin shared the secret to creating a piece of music using just one chord. Whether it's the backing track for a student-written rap, the atmospheric music to play alongside a poetry recital or a project in and of itself, you can create your own song using the powerful autoplay functions inside of GarageBand on iPad.

You can read more about this activity on the Forum here.

Animating your Drawings with Laura Hilltout

Starting out with a simple photograph, Laura teaches us how to draw characters with personality and humour and place them into our real world scene. Not only that but with the powerful Export as GIF feature in Keynote she explores how we can turn a single drawing into a dynamic and fun animation.

Freeform Mind-Maps with Faye Ellis

In our third creative idea Faye explores some of the different ways she's been using the new Freeform app with her students - from designing an advertising campaign to organising ideas, from planning a trip to recording personal memories. This incredibly flexible app opens up endless possibilities for collaboration, organisation and creativity and you can learn more about it on the Forum here.

Keynote Live Video with Jacob Woolcock

Finally, I share a quick idea for using the Live Video feature in Keynote in some unusual ways in the classroom. Originally designed to help share presentations online by superimposing a video of the speaker onto the slide, this clever little feature is perfect for creating a quick and easy green-screen effect as well as interacting with other elements in a presentation. In this example I'll show you how to set up your students as news anchors entirely within Keynote!