Computing
Touch Typing
Being able to touch type is a very valuable life skill that could help you greatly in the future. Even being more familiar with where all the letters, numbers and symbols are located within a keyboard will improve your accuracy and completed words per minute. BBC Dance Mat is an excellent resource for beginners. It is really important to learn the home row first and to make sure your index fingers are located on letters f and j. You will feel the little notches on keys f and j. It is a good idea to put a little piece of velcro on these keys to help find where your hands should be rested.
When learning to touch type it is important that both your hands should hover above the keys and not rest on the desk. Sitting with a straight back will help you to create a positive typing posture too.
As you become more confident, it is a really good idea to keep the keyboard covered as this will help you to look at the screen, rather than the letters on the keyboard. Keyboard stickers are also an excellent resource to develop this skill.
You may like to play some games to develop your skills and there are many examples found on the web. KidzType has a range of games that can help a variety of age groups. Do let me know, ( jblaney@royal-kent.surrey.sch.uk ) if you find any other successful sites.
Touch typing is not going to be mastered in a day! It takes time and perfect practice, so I would recommend dedicating a little bit of your time each day to develop your keyboard skills.
Using Apps on the iPad
It is really important to understand that iPads were designed to enhance creativity. The initial concept was that an iPad was a device that could create images or projects that were not intended to be printed off. So the apps I am going to be recommending have the ability to send completed projects as a PDF document. It may be that the App of the week is one that is featured within the website ilearn2. We have a school account for this excellent site and the login is rkpupil and the password is pupil.
App of the week for this week is Book Creator. The children are very familiar with this app as we use it in school but further help can be found on their website. On ilearn2 they have created a series of video tutorials in Ebook Creation Activity 1 to help you get started.
If you would like to take part in this activity, I would like you to create ebooks on the following topics...
Year 6 - How stacks, caves and arches are formed
Year 5 - St John's River Florida
Year 4 - The River Ganges
Year 3 - The River Nile
Year 2 - The River Thames
Year 1 - The Senses
Reception - I can count to 10
If you are working on a river project, please remember to add geographical vocabulary to your pictures and images. Have lots of fun creating your books and please send me PDF examples of completed work!
More to be creative
One of my favourite apps to make video presentations on an iPad is Apple Clips. It is so simple to use and it has so many features to make your presentations more interesting to your audience. This week I want you to make a presentation on your favourite animal and you may find this tutorial will help you to get started https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9SBAW2hngk
It is a good idea to use lots of the features within Clips to make your presentation stand out. I would though strongly recommend using only one poster design throughout your presentation and stick to using the same font.
For younger iPad users I would recommend using PicCollage to complete this project. To get started in PicCollage go into 'free style' and you can add a photo from your camera file. You can add text to your photo or canvas by tapping on the 'Text' button.
Good luck and send your presentations to jblaney@royal-kent.surrey.sch.uk