blending the trad and the techy....

Right, back to using a bog standard netbook for this entry. It's faster. Much as I love the look and feel of the ipad and my shiny new SII, they just can't beat the click of fingers dancing over a keyboard.
Though I'd do a quick entry about one of the ways I combine using the iPad in class with using our VLE, Moodle, plus some online software to produce a rounded lesson.
My class (an ESOL Level One group) have been looking at narrative tenses and storytelling. I started off this particular session using 'The £2000 Jigsaw' a listening and speaking exercise from Headway Upper Intermediate, 3rd ed, Unit 3. The listening is actually a genunine text from BBC R4's Today, featuring John Humphries interviewing a girl who found £2000 in ripped up banknotes. Students begin by trying to reconstruct the story from prompts, then listen to check, followed by some more detailed questions. Following this, students are encouraged to speculate why the money had been ripped up in the first place. For this phase, I split the learners up into groups, and asked them to make a storyboard of three scenes for the situation. Each group had a large whiteboard each, and spent time debating what the back story could be, and using their mobile phone-based dictionaries to check vocabulary ideas.
After a while, each group had come up with something like this:

I swapped groups round and they then had to try and tell the story of the other group's picture. While they did this, I took pictures of each story on the iPad and placed them on Moodle. We then went to one of the IT rooms, where I got the learners to log on, view their pictures and comment on them, and read the task assignment, which was to use Dvolver to make their stories come to life in a simple animation.
By the end of the session, each group had produced a  short movie, telling the backstory of the missing £2000, for example:
http://www.dvolver.com/live/movies-792863
Overall, a fun, instructive lesson that everyone enjoyed.

mondaaaaaaaaaaay, part two

Well, the second session went somewhat better. The students had been grumbling about connecting their smart phones to the College wireless network, so I demonstrated how to do it to them - a bit of faffing, but, as it turned out, extremely useful faffing. We were doing a section on holidays and, in particular, city breaks - form filling, asking for information in a tourist information office etc. I then decided to change tack from the rather worthy, but somewhat dull task about to heave into view, and wrote the following up on the board:
          Imagine someone is coming to visit Reading for a couple of days. Where can they stay? What can they do?

We brainstormed a few suggestions, then I told them to whip out their smartphones and research things to do in Reading, places to stay, restaurants etc, organising them into groups of 3/4. They wrote their ideas down on flipchart paper, and, with minimal intervention from me, researched and organised their ideas. They then presented these to the other groups, and the class as a whole voted for the best places to stay, eat in, go to etc.
Good, eh?
It didn't finish there. While they were doing that, I went to Page O Rama, and set up a web page, which I then added to the college intranet for all to gawp it. It isn't finished yet, but the whole lesson finished with a satisfying zing.