Creativity on iPad: Three Ideas from my Classroom

One of my favourite things about using iPad is how flexible it is and how it opens up so many powerful educational opportunities for our learners.  When I was asked to put together some creative ideas for a BETT workshop, I found it incredibly hard to narrow it down to three.

Below you'll find some sparks of ideas, little seedlings you can water and grow and hopefully develop into your own creative learning experiences for your students.  And don't worry, I'll share some easy-to-follow videos to support you with each idea.

So, grab your hot beverage and let's get started!

Bringing learning to life has many meanings for teachers, but for me one experience encapsulates it better than any others: Augmented Reality. Being able to bring an abstract concept or idea, or a particular time and place, or maybe a character or landmark right into your classroom is an incredibly powerful way of engaging learners in a topic or project. Having the Eiffel Tower on your desk for the students to walk around and explore in 3D is so much more impactful that finding a picture from the internet.

But what if we could take this one step further and get the students themselves to create the models which we are then viewing in Augmented Reality?

In my classroom this project is made possible using a free app called Tinkercad, which is a friendly and easy-to-use tool for students to use to build whatever they can imagine. Think of it as an unlimited amount of wooden building blocks, but digital.

The barrier to entry here is really low, but with some creativity and experimentation there are no limits to what students can build.

My first few lessons of introducing a new class to Tinkercad always follow the same format: Learning how the basic move, resize and rotate tools work by building six cubes of differing colours. Each cube should have one property changed - e.g. size or height. Once the students have mastered this we're ready to go into my second lesson: Build Challenges. From here on out I emphasise the fact that we don't need to be perfect in our builds, but we do need to have fun. So we make it into a game. "Right Class 8, I'm going to give you seven minutes to build a rocket, but you have to use exactly 9 blocks". "You're going to have eight minutes to make a panda, but you must use exactly 12 blocks". And so it goes with a series of low stakes, high energy challenges to get the students using and exploring those tools. They'll inevitably discover something new and a ripple of excitement will spread around the classroom. But after a couple of gamified sessions (with Dojo points or stickers for the most interesting designs) they'll be ready to go into designing whatever you'd like.

We can then apply these skills to our topics and projects. For instance Year 4 have been learning about Ancient Rome this term and so it felt a perfect fit to get them to build a historical landmark like the Pantheon in Tinkercad. We were then able to scale these up to near life-size on the playground and the children got to feel the size and stature of such an iconic building. I also surprised them after a few days in Rome with photos of their models at the actual Pantheon!

Don't let these students incredible builds overwhelm you, Tinkercad is super easy (and fun) to use and it won't take long until you're turning your imagination into your own augmented reality creations!

 📺 Jump in to my Getting Started with Tinkercad for iPad Series here.

We all know green screen: the presenter with a weather map behind them, the students transported to Ancient Egypt or the Mars Rovers exploring the surface of the Red Planet.  

But we also likely know the stress that a green screen lesson can cause.  Where are the sheets?  I’ve lost one of those tripods! Who’s borrowed the clips?!  And of course not forgetting the fact you have thirty students and only two green screens resulting in lost learning time as learners queue up waiting their turn.

A few years ago I was trying to solve this problem in my own school and realised that actually we could turn Green Screen on its head - rather than removing the background using a large green backdrop what if we removed something from the foreground using a much smaller green prop?

The Green Screen Magic Reveal was born.

This activity provides the perfect chance to go deeper into a topic or project.  A chance to uncover the past, reveal a secret or expose learning in a fun and memorable way.  And it’s super simple.

You just need two video clips, a green object and some creativity!  The key thing to remember is that one of your two clips should be the background (which includes the secret you are revealing) and the other clip should be the foreground (which has the normal object as well as something green).

I’ll attach a full walkthrough of how you can use this idea in your own classrooms, but I would love to see your own spin on this too!  Please do share your ideas, experiences or tips in the comments below this post.

📺 You can watch my full Magic Reveal QuickLesson video here.

If there was one app on the iPad that I simply couldn't live without, it would be Freeform. This app is everything I want - and everything I didn't even know I needed! You can work on a canvas that stretches out forever in any direction, meaning you can start a small project and let it grow and grow and grow. And that's exactly what my third Creative Idea is all about - and in particular a group of students called the Jelly Friends.

These pupils wanted a way to evidence their learning journey over an 8 month period as part of the FIRST LEGO League competition. After showing them Freeform at the beginning of September I didn't really think much more of it, until I noticed a few weeks later that all nine of them were still working and collaborating on the document.

As the term went on their Freeform board continued started to grow and morph and take on a life of its own - becoming the most impressive and powerful document of hard work, dedication and creativity. It's hard to convey the scale of the project in still images, but just spending a few minutes exploring their Freeform will show you exactly why this became my favourite moment in 10+ years of teaching. It's truly breathtaking.

And it wasn't just me who was blown away by this work. The competition saw the team sail through the Cornish finals with near full marks from the judges. They then went on to compete at the UK National Final (with a 5 metre printed banner of their board!) and, as a result of this Freeform board and their incredible work ethic, got invited to take part in an International Final in Massachusetts, USA last summer.

The moral of this story is simple. Freeform has no limits. Students don't either. If they are passionate about a topic, curious to learn and eager to create they can achieve anything. Freeform is the PERFECT app to facilitate this and if it's an app you haven't explored with your students yet I would urge you to give it a try. It's a game changer.

📺 To get up to speed on the basics yourself, you can watch my full guide to Freeform for iPad, iPhone and Mac here. 

I hope these three ideas get you thinking about ways you might be able to integrate Augmented Reality, Green Screen or Freeform into your own classes and schools. I would genuinely love to hear how you get on with these ideas (and how you put your own spin on them too!) so please do share them in the comments.

I can't wait to see what you and your learners create.