Scrap It

Last Friday we went on excursion to Perth Hills Centre at Mundaring.  I thought I would try and integrate a bit of technology into the recount rather than the doing the same old recount every time you do an excursion.

We used an app called Scrap It.  It is a scrapbooking app so it was a bit 'pretty' for this activity but worked well otherwise.

The children had to choose 3 events from the excursion and import them into the app.  They then had to type up a sentence or two to go with each picture and a title.

I then saved them to the camera roll so they could be used.

So, how did it go?

The kids loved it.  They were so engaged in it.  We had a photographer come in to take photos and they barely looked up from the ipads, unlike normal occasions where any interruption is an excuse to stop working.

It took them awhile to make the page but if they used it more frequently they could be quite quick.  The app itself was pretty easy to use and once they worked it out they were off.

We will need to do a lot more typing lessons if we get them next year as some of the spelling is atrocious and I know they would have done it much better if they were writing it.  I think it was hard to sound out words while using new technology at the same time.

Getting the photos onto the 5 ipads was a little tricky to start with.  I tried emailing them but could only send 2 or 3 photos per email- way too hard when there is over 100 photos!

I ended up setting up a dropbox account for each of the ipads.  I then set up a year 1 folder and shared it with all 5 ipads.  This meant that everything I uploaded into that file would appear on each ipad.  Genius!

However, it appears that things stored in dropbox still need to be downloaded onto the ipad if you want to use them so I then had to go through each ipad and import the photos onto the camera roll. Fiddly!  This syncing business just keeps looking better and better.