Summer School Ipad Class Summary

This year's summer school ipad class (Ilearn with Ipads) has come to an end and has again been a favorite for many students.  For each session kids left the first couple days saying, "I love this class."  Part of this was because they can't help but love a class where they feel they are just playing games on an ipad.  What they don't see is that the "games" they are playing help students develop their problem solving skills, creativity, artistic side, math facts, vocabulary, or spelling.  Every year I am frustrated with the amount of time that needs to be spent up front finding and testing apps but in the end I always feel good about the class that I was able to offer.

When choosing apps, my primary objectives are to find apps that:

• help students develop problem solving skills and the ability to think outside the box to find answers
• help students persevere when apps become challenging rather than give up
• offer students a list of challenge or academic apps that they can add to their own home devices 

I can consider an app successful if after introducing the app:

• students come in to tell me they just put the app on their own device
• students come in and can't wait to start playing an app so they can get to the next level                 (One T Draw was good for that 2nd session)
• play the apps I introduced during challenge and school time instead of playing old favorites            (Big success when these apps beat out minecraft or clash of clans)

Apps used this year 

Most often played during free choice (and beat minecraft or clash of clans :)

• Falling stars: Also introduced in a music class
• Magic Piano: Cool and new this year for kids
• Smule Sing
• Pottery:  Always a favorite
• Draw N Guess: played most often.  Students liked the social aspect of playing over wifi against friends.
• Spy Mouse: probably most downloaded by students on their own devices
• One T Draw
• Dump Truck
• Flockwork
• HairSalon: students would create their own hair style and have students vote on which they thought was the best do.  What I thought was cool is that they specifically explained why they liked one style over another.

Students liked but didn't often play on their own

• Educreations
• Soundrop
• Sketchin
• Brain Lab
• What Pic
• Scratch Pic
• 4 Pics 1 word
• Brain School
• Stack the States
• Google Earth
• Flow: Favorite last year but most kids had already played it
• Munch Time
• Greedy Spiders: always a difficult game but kids still enjoy it
• Slice It
• Quell
• Flockwork
• Where's Perry
• Where's my Water
• Where's my Cheese
• Lazors
• Doodle Destroy
• Math Evolve
• Math Zombies
• Numbers
• Math Ninja
• Math Rocket: played only the first session.  Turns out you don't even need to do math in order to build the rocket.  Kids cheat.
• Letris

Introduced but not really hits:

• Educreations:  Great App for introducing themselves the first day
• Animation HD: some kids did great with this but others didn't really want to put the thought or time in to create something nice
• Singing Fingers
• World of Oil: Tough game for a lot of the kids to play
• Toy Physics: Again, kids struggled
• Connect the Bulb: Students didn't really understand the game.  I really liked it though.  Maybe it was too difficult

Ideas for next year:

• More social games!  Maybe even a class of just social games with the ipad??  Will need to pay for many of these or create game center accounts.  Each ipad could have a generic account.