At OLQP our objective was to use the IPADS to really engage students in authentic Maths tasks. At first the children (and the teachers) were enthusiastically looking at the games that could be downloaded to support learning. While all the games that the children have been using are really fun and reinforce skills taught in Mathematics the difficulty has been sharing the ipads amoungst four classes. It seemed that instead of supporting the learning while it was actually happening in the clasroom the students were looking on the ipads as a tool for playing games or as an incentive to finish class work and move onto the ipads.
This week we are encouraging children to use the ipads as a way of recording learning and/or looking at that APS which provide opportunities for putting Maths into real life contexts. We are looking at APS that provide timetables, graphs, menus etc - rather than those that are specifically designed for education. We are encouraging students to create real life mathematical problems and to solve and record them using IPADS. Any suggestions for APS that are "year 3" friendly and provide simple data that can be used to create and solve authentic mathematical problems would be most appreciated.