Year 3 celebrate the Queen's 90th birthday.

I recently went on a training course with @musicmind. Nina Jackson was wonderful, sharing ideas for using iPads with SEND children. I will go through some of the apps we used, and how this has helped me in the classroom via other posts coming soon. One of the ideas I wanted to share today was how I used YakitKids app following the training session with Nina.

 

Link to app here.

 

To give you a quick overview, here are a couple of videos I made on the day, I will stress this was under a limited timeframe.

 

 Watch video via Twitter

Watch video via Twitter

 

I will add the video next week, when the building is open following the building work.



 

 

The Lesson

As part of Queen Elizabeth's 90th birthday celebrations we decided to make a video for her 90 years celebration.

I love to start a lesson with a research project. There are a few key points we must use when doing research in our class:

• Use Google to search for appropriate content - We usually add the phrase 'for children' or 'for kids' to the end of our search questions.
• Examine the results list, choose the most appropriate results for your research.
• Ensure the facts are not only relevant but interesting for the reader/ viewer.
• Write your facts using subheadings and bullet points to simplify and organise them.

I like children to work in pairs for this type of task. These will generally be mixed ability pairs (keeping those who struggle with writing engaged). In my experience the children find it easier to learn and remember information when they are engaged in the research themselves.

When we had acquired the 5 facts, we were ready to start our video.

The children were given the choice of which app they could use to make their video, YAKiT Kids or Videoscribe Anywhere. Having previously used both these apps, a quick refresher in key functions was all that was needed.

See links at the bottom for a quick guide to using YAKiT Kids and Videoscribe Anywhere.

Evaluation

Pros:

• Both apps are very child friendly.
• A great way of editing and evaluating your own work: Are all words spelt correctly? Does your work make sense? Is it interesting? Is it clear for the viewer/ reader?
• Visually appealing.
• High levels of engagement from children of all abilities.
• Great opportunities for 'app smashing': Internet, photos, sound, music.

Improvements for next time:

• Be clear on what items the children can use: Having a singing devil or zombie may not be appropriate on all videos.Facial features and sparkles or hearts are fine, but I had to suggest some changes to children's work when we had some singing poops (not very regal).
• When recording voice or music for your video, leave a 1-2 second gap at the end of your recording before pressing stop. This allows for overlaps if you join videos together, and, or for any transitions in the videos.
• When using Videotime Anywhere, remind children to be careful pinching the screen.It won't affect the end product, but we have lost parts of our video production by pinching them too small.
• On Videoscribe Anywhere, transition lengths are at the bottom of the screen. Children may need to adjust these slightly or videos can become far too long, and the viewer can lose interest. We generally say between 3 and 6 seconds a scene is plenty. However, this can depend on the amount of content in each scene.

Now that is a few improvements I have suggested, but if you can avoid the danger areas I ran into to begin with, your lesson will run much smoother, making it easier for you and your class.

Our Results:

Videoscribe Anywhere

 

Links:

My guide to YAKiT Kids
My guide to Videoscribe Anywhere

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