Supporting Inquiry with Apps

Our school does a BYOD  iPad program for grades 3-5, and then we have sets of iPads that are shared with EY-P2. Using iPads for learning has been really beneficial but it’s not all rainbows and flowers. It takes experience and thoughtfulness when using apps because sometimes you spend more time on learning the technology vs. actually doing the project you intended. This happened twice last year for me while using Padlet to do a collaborative mindmap as a part of a formative assessment and then keeping a digital journal using Microsoft’s OneNote.  It was a love-hate relationship, and I learned a lot from the experience.

So now as I support teachers with using apps in their classroom I have to think about how long it might take to teach a new application and if the benefits of the learning outweigh this loss of instruction. Here are some apps that I like that I think can support some of our upcoming Units of Inquiry:

EY 4: People can help our communities by working in different ways.

• Inventioneers and Busy Water. I love these apps because they have a great STEM link for little ones as they learn how to design and build structures in order to solve problems. Busy water is less challenging, in my opinion, but both games are engaging.

KG:  Living things have specific needs in order to grow and stay healthy.

• Virry: This is a great interactive game with “live” animals (I presume in a zoo setting), in which you get to feed animals like lions or meerkats. The free version just lets the kids do limited basic things whereas if you get a subscription, you have more engagement and learn more about the animals. I don’t mind paying for subscriptions when more content is added, but I haven’t seen that yet. However, it is a very unique game and it is worth the .99 USD for a month of its use.

P1: Personal histories help us to reflect on who we are and where we’ve come from.

• Aging Booth or Old Fart Booth: The kids LOVE these! This apps give them the impression of what they could look like as an elderly person. And the apps are FREE–my favorite word!

P2: Maps can be used to help people locate places.

 Google Maps and Google Earth are the most obvious choices. And although there are other great apps out there , after reading this website, I think that Google Maps is so rich, there is no reason why other apps are really needed. Quality over quantity! However, teachers could recommend other apps like National Girrafic and Tiny Countries for home learning.

P3: Understanding movement enhances our creativity.

We have had a lot of conversation about which way this inquiry could go. The Arts teachers will obviously focus on dance and expressing movement visually. The last unit was about covered content like body systems and nutrition so I thought Grade 3 could consider movement in terms of exercise and think about apps like Charity Miles to link creative ways to encourage movement. But if you consider movement with a perspective as a scientist or engineer, then that opens up a variety of other applications. Here are some ideas:

• Scratch Jr, Hopscotch , or Logotacular: coding comes to mind as a neat way to think about programming movement. However, it really depends upon the teacher and their skill level in order to guide students, but there are a myriad of coding apps (more than I listed here), so it would be easy to differentiate for learners.
• Simple Machines: I am a fan of the Tinybop developer apps. This one is quite nice but I do think Inventioneers could more engaging for this age group; although the Amazing Alex app would be my first choice–if only it was offered for iPads. Sigh..

I’ve already blogged about using technology in the upcoming P4 unit: Getting Modern about Ancient Times. And P5’s next unit (Humans express their ideas and use persuasion to influence others.) focusing on using surveys, which they use Excel for their results; so their technology concentration is on using spreadsheets and converting data into graphical representations with that program.

But hopefully sharing these ideas will help inspire you about what and how you can use apps in your classroom. I really interested in others’ ideas if any other apps come to mind when looking at our Central Ideas for our inquiries. Please share in the comments below!

Happy Apping!