Over the summer it’s time for us teachers to prepare for our new class and the year ahead. Over the next few weeks I’m going to put spotlights on particular topics or themes, highlighting some apps which can support learning. This August the AppStore team have selected the best interactive stories, games and knowledge apps for a collection called ‘Underwater Adventures’. Their collections are always interesting and pick out great apps to use for lessons in the classroom. Take a look at this featured collection here.
I’ve taken a quick walk through this latest collection and picked out a few apps which look like good fun for early years and ones which can develop knowledge and understanding in this topic.
Explorium
Discover marine life with this app and find the answers to some of these big questions:
“What fish is the bravest in the world?””Who is the most caring sea dad?”
“What mammal is the best ocean diver?”
This interactive encyclopaedia takes the form of a game as children
discover marine life through a journey with characters Alice and Alex. They follow a treasure map to find the Lost City of Atlantis and complete mini-games to learn amazing facts about the ocean and its inhabitants.
MarcoPolo Ocean
Another discovery app for your underwater topic. In this app children build their own coral reef, create an aquarium and learn ocean concepts in this playfully narrated and animated ocean app.
This app is another encyclopaedia style app, however, there is a free-play mode where kids can build their own aquarium however they choose, navigating the ocean floor and shoreline in a submarine they build.
Download MarcoPolo Ocean here.
Make a Scene: Under the Sea
Here is a real simple sea life scene creation app. Simply a sticker app to engage those children who are less likely to visit your art area but are enticed by technology. It’s a steal at 79p and has the potential to bring out lots of language.
Download Make a Scene: Under the Sea here.
These are just 3 apps from this new featured collection, and are stand-alone activities that can be part of provision. It’s always worth to think about enhancement when using apps. How is the technology enhancing the learning? Try to build in opportunities for children to record what they have made and reflect on their work. You could save the scenes from Make a Scene: Under the Sea and put those backgrounds in Puppet Pals to tell a sea story. Children could apply their learning from the Explorium app by authoring a non-fiction book in Book Creator, using their own drawings or screen shots from the app. By using these two apps, children will move from consuming information to creating content on the iPads.
Enabling Environments 