Whilst junior students are small, they have huge imaginations with so much to say
yet they are not always able to express themselves fully through writing or illustrations. This is where the app 30 Hands comes into play, an app that is easy for young students to learn and create and quite like our young students has a lot to offer. 30 Hands allows you to create simple but engaging presentations using photos, drawings and text, not to mention you are able to record voice over your slides to create a more engaging presentation.
It is so easy to use and in just a few simple steps students can create a completed presentation to explore and demonstrate their learning. Presentations can be published and saved to the device allowing for quick and easy sharing to other apps such as Drive, SeeSaw or Class Dojo. A real winning feature is that students can create and work on multiple presentations at once and build a digital portfolio of their learning. At the beginning of each year I work closely with our Prep team to teach our Prep students how to use this app to set them up for success. After only a few sessions learning our little students become presentation experts who use the app to complete passion projects and assessment tasks before they can write a full sentence. Whilst my experience with the app is predominantly in the Prep classroom, it has the potential to be a powerful tool in any year level.
Some successful lessons and ideas include:
Creating or retelling a narrative - A perfect app for creating picture storybooks and retelling narratives. Students absolutely love using 30 Hands to create their own stories. By adding backgrounds, images and drawing students can create their own stories and turn them into a read-aloud to be shared with classmates.
Explain different strategies to solve a mathematical problem - I think all teachers can agree that when students solve a problem we want to know how they got their answer. The draw tool is perfect for this. Start by simply drawing your answer just like you would on paper and finish by recording an explanation of your thinking. I have loved creating a presentation that is continually added to so I can monitor the development of thinking and problem solving strategies.
Demonstrate understanding of the scientific concepts - By combining a range of tools found in the app, students can document the life cycle of an animal. Our Prep students watched and observed the life cycle of a butterfly and used the different slide types to demonstrate their understanding of the life cycle. Students used the draw tool to show an egg on a leaf and used the camera tool to take images of the caterpillar, chrysalis and butterfly. They labeled each image with text and used the recording tool to explain their understanding.
Available in the App Store
$9.99 per licence but reduces to $4.99 when purchasing 20+ via the Apple Education Volume Purchasing Program (highly recommended)
Written by Guest Writer Cassie Paganis