Mobile @ Priory in Spanish. Guest post by @rachelo_j

One of the exciting aspects of the Mobile @ Priory project, which all started with the creation of a mobile device policy allowing students to bring them in to school, is that effect it’s had on the whole school.  Rachel Jackson’s Spanish adventure is a good example. 

This is the third in a series of guest posts about the project, giving you lovely readers a break from my random musings… You can find the first, written by our Headteacher, James Humphries,  here and the second, by NQT mega star Sam Atkins (creator of Olympic Geocaching), here.  I taught him everything I know

Here’s Rachel’s post:

I have been doing some mobile learning with my Year 7s in Spanish classes and I co-planned a two hour lesson with the creative partners and DiGITAL LEADERS to teach with iPads.

The topic was ‘House and Home’. Pupils were divided into groups and each group was allocated a room in a house. There were enough groups to be able to create a ‘whole house’ so the rooms were: living room, dining room, kitchen, home office, bathroom and bedroom.

Pupils were issued with an A3 sheet of paper that had a different QR code for each room. Each QR code took them to the appropriate URL link on the Spanish Ikea site so they were able to access information quickly and efficiently. From here they were then free to browse items on the site and ‘fill up’ their room according to their budget. There was a certain amount of numeracy involved because the groups felt the need to convert the budget to pound sterling so they used an app on the iPad that again, gave them access to this information.

In order to encourage the pupils to use their oral skills in the lesson and converse in the target language I created discount vouchers that they were able to apply to their purchases. So for example, if a student asked me a question in Spanish about a certain item then depending on how long the sentence was and the variety of vocabulary used, they would receive a discount. This worked really well as they were keen to buy the best furniture for as little as possible so I was rather pleased with the conversing in Spanish that took place. Literacy skills were improved also as on their worksheets they had to write the names of the items of furniture they were buying in Spanish.

The pace and timing of the double session I think went really well. I don’t think just an hour would have been enough as they needed time to become familiar with the website lay out, scan QR codes and convert their budget.

If I were to do this lesson again next time, it would be great if there was an app I could use where the pupils could view each others rooms from their own iPad. Therefore each group would be able to view the ‘whole house’ so almost as if each group could see the ‘class house’ that had been created by individual groups.

I would say the best parts about this lesson were the quick and efficient access to information that we had through the use of the iPads. The QR codes were really useful in saving the pupils time and taking them straight to the relevant URL link on the site.

I would say the only disadvantage to this project was not having a stronger Wi-Fi signal in the whole of the building as we had to bring down a mobile network from upstairs so that the pupils were able to access it from the classroom where they were working. I think that if I was to do this again next time then it would be good to plan ahead and do something where they are able to access this information quicker. I also think that the students really enjoyed the access to information that they had so that they were able to converse in Spanish.

A huge thank you to Rachel for exploring the possibilities.  I will be talking about the mobile adventure at #tmpompey on the 4th of July.  Find out more here.