Some schools are lucky to have a bigger budget for technology. Afterwards they might even decide to invite family members to school to watch their movies, complete with popcorn! And then, on the day of the workshop, they will work in the roles they have allocated themselves and have a lot of fun creating their movies. They will learn how to work together and how to make best use of individual talents. They will discuss plot and create storyboards and character profiles, design and create their sets, plan their lighting and write their scripts. In the days leading up to the workshop the children will collaborate in small groups to plan their animations. The Smoovie Team is excited to have been invited by this school to run a Smoovie Stop Motion Animation Workshop in the next few weeks. So if the budget really is tight, why not do what one of our local schools did earlier this month - invest in fewer iPads and explore all the ways in which children can collaborate on team projects with an accessible range of affordable, quality apps at their fingertips. You are getting the internet, powerful creative apps like iMovie and GarageBand, excellent utility apps like Keynote, Pages and Numbers, the ability to print, to interact with other iPads on the school network and to save work. You are getting a fully-fledged computer. And it goes without saying that, with the iPad, you are getting so much more than a player of educational apps. With a huge range of brilliant, highly affordable educational apps on the App Store, together with Apple’s Volume Purchase Program which enables developers to pass on an educational discount of up to 50% on purchases of 20 or more apps, the possibilities are practically endless on the iPad and schools can afford to keep up to date with the latest advances in apps.
Games for these consoles, however useful, are individually very expensive and this limits how often schools can invest in something new. For the price of one iPad you could purchase three portable games consoles, so that must be a good thing right? But we think this is false economy. We know that budget is always an issue in education.
Over the years we have watched as schools, carried on the wave of technology for technology’s sake, invested in set after set of portable games consoles for the classroom complete with a limited range of games and nothing more. Unlike so many other ‘one-trick-pony’ technologies that have been introduced to the classroom and have quickly ended up gathering dust in a cupboard. The iPad is not only a brilliantly designed and reliable piece of hardware, it is so much more. Technology in education can be a wonderful thing, but it has to be the right kind of technology. The benefits of the iPad in the classroom have been screamingly obvious to us for years now, indeed that was a huge factor in developing our stop motion animation app (Smoovie) specifically for the iPad. Not surprisingly, here at Smoovie HQ we are huge fans of the iPad in education. The Apple Solution Expert Village had its very own theatre, which ran a packed schedule throughout the entire show featuring speakers who have pioneered some of the world’s most innovative learning programmes using Apple technologies. We remember not so long ago it was a rare thing to see Apple technology in the classrooms of the UK and Europe (the US education system was a much earlier adopter) and we love the fact that this year there was a stand dedicated to Apple technology in the classroom. The show is all about transforming education for the better, through technology. This leading education technology show is one of the largest of its kind in the world, and is held every January in the UK. Last week was BETT week (British Educational Training and Technology Show).