On iPods and iPads

Today we examined apps available on iPods and iPads and how they would be useful in the classroom. I had difficulty finding anything that seemed particularly useful or interesting for some time, but I eventually came across an app designed for students with autism spectrum disorder or other cognitive difficulties. As I have experience working with said students and an interest in autism, I decided to follow this thread and find some other autism-based apps. I found an app that was simply a database of other apps that might be useful for autistic students, and that led me in some interesting directions.

As our project was to find apps to incorporate into a lesson, I had to decide what direction to take the lesson, what topic the apps should deal with. I looked at communication, basic cause-and-effect teaching, a "visual cue" app designed to help students understand what they needed to do next (a picture of washing hands instead of/in addition to the words), and several other items including an "observation" app to help teachers track their students' progress. For each, I saw usefulness in the classroom, but not one that seemed to integrate easily with a lesson, until I came across the "Social Express" app. One of the biggest problem autistic students have, even the high-functioning ones, is recognizing and interpreting emotions. Social Express shows animated characters interacting and clearly showing various emotions, with the app guiding the student into recognizing them--"this character is sad. She is frowning, her shoulders are slumped, and she's looking down." I thought it was an innovative app--basically the same concept as videos on the same subject, but more interactive. I found another similar app, that asked students to touch the picture of "the crying boy" or "the happy men," and thought that these would work together well, so worked up a quick lesson based on recognizing the basic emotions.

We also created very small and simple iPod apps using the Xcode program, which I didn't realize was even a thing, much less a free and (relatively) easy-to-use programmer. I have no coding experience outside a few lines of HTML and Textile formatting I use on a gaming wiki I maintain, but I found the simple task we had to accomplish easy to do and kind of fun. I doubt I'll actually learn how to code iPod apps, but it's worth noting that simple apps are simple to create.

I've had a fairly easy time in this class, being a tech-savvy individual, but I'm a bit nervous about the final project--lesson planning is pretty new to me, as while I've worked as a TA, that's all about following another person's plan. I'm also used to working in environments with little to no technology available, so the idea of incorporating technology into a teaching environment is a bit daunting. I'm having trouble coming up with an idea for the lesson right now... maybe I'll just go for an old standard (for me) like introducing fairy tales, asking the students to follow the plot and identify the lesson, and maybe ask them to create their own fairy tales using some kind of "picture book creator" app like I encountered during the Web 2.0 session.

Maybe. It's a place to start.