Authentic & Relevant Learning with iPad

Have you ever had a time when you’ve had to come up with a relevant and authentic way to use digital tools - in a very short space of time?

I recently had an experience just like that where I was asked to take a class that was focused on symmetry and wanted to use digital tools in a purposeful way. They were also looking at inventions and inventors for their Unit of Inquiry.

What happened turned out to be super engaging! Here’s what we did:

1.We began by talking about why people invent new things. After some discussion we agreed that it was often to solve a problem that they had identified. 

With that in mind I modelled how to generate a new invention using Sparky. (This is a Google Arts & Culture ‘Play’ activity.)

Sparky asks you to choose from three themes; food, travel or music.

You then add 2 images to a piece of paper, personalise a prompt with some keywords and watch your invention appear. It also gives you a text description of how the invention works.

This was a great opportunity to introduce the basic concepts of Generative AI. I asked them how they thought the AI generated their new invention. Their answers revealed some common misconceptions which could be easily corrected in a simple way.

I don't expect that these students will remember all that we discussed, but the more often we have these conversations, the more they will understand that AI is not magic, it is making a prediction based on the prompt you give it and the data it has been trained on.

I then put a 10 minute timer on and off they went, inventing and re-inventing!

At the end of the time they had to have downloaded at least one of the inventions they had generated. (Of course, some students had multiple!)

1. They then found someone they hadn’t talked to that day and shared their new invention. They had to explain two things;
2. how their invention worked
3. what problem their invention was helping to solve

This invention launches snacks when you get home from school.

2.Our next step was to save our invention with a transparent background. This provided a fantastic opportunity for some students to be teachers and help those who didn’t know how to do it. 

Our students are all on iPads so they showed their buddy the long finger press >share > save image method.

After they had identified the symmetrical shapes (and this was a great quick assessment of who understood this concept and who hadn’t quite got it yet) they had to think about where they would find their invention.

If it was a snack dispenser then would they find it on the kitchen bench or would it be on the coffee table in the lounge?

We used pexels to find either an image or a video to use as our background. Again I used a timer, this time I gave them five minutes to choose what they wanted to use and save it to their Photo album.

4.The final step was to open a new Keynote file, delete the text boxes (long finger press > drag > delete) and import their chosen background.

They added their invention to their slide and animated it using the motion path to show how it worked or what its purpose was.

Ideally I would have had them record their voice explaining the symmetry they could see and  what problem their invention was solving but unfortunately we ran out of time - which is a very common occurrence in today's classrooms. 

However because they had already chatted with a buddy about their invention and I could see evidence of their identification of symmetry I was ok with not getting to this stage.

What started out as an “Oh my goodness, what am I going to do?” turned into an engaging and meaningful session.

When have you found yourself in this situation and what have you come up with that engaged your students? 

I’d love to hear other ideas for the next time I need to think on my feet. 😊