When I’m not being a Teaching Assistant or Learning Mentor I fill my ‘spare’ time as a Lunchtime Supervisor. Now this gives me some real freedom in the classroom. I share my lunchtime with my Year 5 class and I got thinking that during this time we have a real opportunity to try some things out.
So I dug out my wife’s old Nintendo DS and a brain training game and I loaded up some Apps on my iPhone and gave them both out to the class to use. I also fired up the whiteboard and got a tone matrix running. They are really, and I mean really, excited to get their hands on the technology. Now the students are creating ambient music whilst we have our lunch and my main issue now is making sure everyone has a fair turn on the limited amount of kit we have whilst keeping up with how well everyone is doing on the ‘games’.
It’s early days but their enthusiasm is showing the way this needs to go. There is an old PC in the corner of the classroom which I literally blew the dust off last week but it looks like I might be able to get a net connection on it so that is going to be my focus next week. That and OFSTED inspectors but that’s another story 
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Anyway and as if by magic my PLN came up trumps and tweeted this great, and very much related, post on Learn 4 Life;
What happens when you give a class of 8 year old children an iPod touch each?
