Over last few years there has been an explosion of new devices in the market. iPods, iPads, Tablets, eeePC’s, Audio Recorders. With this has come a wide range of uses and experiences as well as problems needing to be solved. This year Townsville Catholic Education has supported teachers to explore the possibilities to improve learning opportunities.

This year students at Southern Cross Catholic School have used iPods to create media rich content from learning activities and then shared them with the wider school community, family and friends through individual and group blogs. Students use a range of apps available on the iTunes store to record reflections and then email from the iPod to their blog. Through the use of the blogging site Posterous teachers have had the control to accept posts to blogs through email and then moderate posts
and reflections before going live to the web.

This has been used well to support students learning when they created a campaign to change social issue in and around the school. The year 6 students worked together to highlight the safety of the school round-a-bout to local government and then broke into smaller groups to persuade students at the school with a range of social issues.

Students have also had the opportunity to use new Honeycomb Tablet, ACER A500, similar to the iPad that include proxy support and Adobe Flash. This has also given teachers the ability to use the wide range of interactive websites available to teachers a real chance to use sites such as Scootle, Study Ladder, Sumdog and much more. With tablets ability to use flash based activities in less than minute compared to the PC’s ten minute it has become an important device to aide learning in a time poor classroom.