Liberating Learning in Literacy

Thursday March 1 was World Book Day 2012. What an ideal time to get together with Literacy leaders from a variety of Bradford schools to spend time looking at devices and software to support the delivery of Literacy in schools. With a theme based on consumer to creators, James Langley and Vicki Cox presented the group with tasks using Kindles, iPods, iPads, Web 2.0 and Android.
The morning session consisted of quick fire app activities to support spellings, phonics and sentence based activities. Discussions about how Kindles support engagement of reading including how some schools are sharing content across countries were also shared. Besides looking at a variety of books with features such as 3d, read along, record your own and read yourself, the group also focussed on supportive apps that could help children who often read in other languages.
The afternoon session prompted the group to become creators using a variety of apps. Creating a non fiction text with images, text and audio was one of the tasks tackled by the group. Apps varying in purpose and ability were compared by practitioners varying from Reception to Year 6.
By the end of the day, each person was able to take away valuable information to help them in their quest to provide an engaging, supportive, differentiated Literacy learning environment with a variety of tools to help them do so. A very enjoyable day.