Foster Early Years Literacy with iPad

As part of the Australian & New Zealand Apple Professional Learning Live series - we explored how we can support literacy and language learning for our early learners using Keynote on iPad.

We began with some very simple activities that I have used with my own students. These are activities that helped my students build some foundational iPad and Keynote skills and at the same time connect with their literacy learning.

The first activity was making a simple Sound Dictionary - with the focus being 'Diagraphs'. Here is a video walkthrough of the process we explored.

For the second activity we explored the addition of some simple animations. The example we stepped through during the workshop was animating compound words. This is something my own students really enjoy! Especially with so many fun and exciting animation options available!

For the final activity explored creating simple vocabulary builders using Keynote. In this activity I also demonstrated how students could make use of iPad Accessibility features (Dictation and Speak Selection) to capture their knowledge and understanding.

Throughout the workshop we also looked at how we could create simple learning scaffolds/templates within Keynote for our younger learners who might find some of the Keynote creation processes a bit too complex. Keynote is a fantastic platform for creating such scaffolds and there is a wealth of awesome scaffold resources that have been shared via our Education Community.

Below is a Padlet that I put together for the workshop that contains video walkthroughs for everything we covered, along with some examples of scaffolds and links to other APLS resources that are well worth exploring. I also created some simple instructional videos demonstrating how you might make your own learning scaffolds using Keynote. Here is the link to access.

A huge thanks to our APLS community for your constant inspiration and to those of you who have shared your own stories and resources! 💕 I would love to hear in the comments how you are using Keynote to foster early years literacy with iPad. 😃