National Poetry Day

The temperature has started dropping, people are discussing Halloween costumes and the layers are creeping out of wardrobes once again. That means it’s October! And in October, National Poetry Day is celebrated every year. (Follow @PoetryDayUK for updates and take a look at #nationalpoetryday.)

On 6th October, especially here in the UK, social media will be filled with extracts of poems and tales of favourites. To celebrate, we have created FOUR free poetry activities for iPads - especially for Year 10s and 11s studying for GCSEs.

Each and every activity relates to AQA English Literature Unit 2: Poetry Across Time, but focuses on a different element of Moon on the Tides. There are:

• Character and Voice (Task Code 1980)
• Place (Task Code 7931)
• Conflict (Task Code 4726)
• Relationships (Task Code 9626)

They are similar in how they are set up and are ideally carried out after students have studied all the poems in the relevant section of the anthology.

In each activity, there are illustrated titles of poems from on of the sections above. Students must look at these, discuss what each poem is about (if they know), then sort them into groups which they give names to. By doing so, this facilitates students toward comparing and cross-referencing the poems: an essential skill.

It will also encourage discussion amongst students about the content of the poems and their themes, as well as highlight possible gaps which need to be addressed.

All you need to do to download these activities FREE is:

1. Download the Thinking Kit App - click here or search Thinking Kit App on the App Store.
2. You or students can then go to the app, tap Educator or Learner > New Session > Download Task then enter the Task Code of the activity you want to try:
   
   • Character and Voice (1980)
   • Place (7931)
   • Conflict (4726)
   • Relationships (9626)

If you do use the activities, please share on social media and mention us @refthinking. We'll pick someone out at random to win a FREE individual subscription to the tool that lets you/students create such activities as these, the Thinking Kit Creator.

If you have any questions at all, please tweet us or send me an email at natalie@reflectivethinking.com.

iPad apps for schools, to mark Shakespeare's 400th Anniversary and Shakespeare Week

If you don’t know already, the 23rd April 2016 is being marked as 'celebrating 400 years of Shakespeare's legacy' and also, 14th - 20th March 2016 is National Shakespeare Week. There are some great resources on the official website, and we have made our apps half-price in celebration too.

They are called Digital Mysteries and are for iPads. We have them for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (11-16), Romeo & Juliet (11-16) and Macbeth (14-16). Each consists of one open question on the play, e.g. ‘Which of the characters in 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream' possess the most power?’ and 15-30 slips of information to help them answer it. There are additional sub-questions provided which you can ask too! They come with built in differentiation (easy/medium/hard), so you can easily more suit them to each group.

What’s different about using mysteries to explore Shakespeare?

• Truly collaborative – more than one student can interact with the tech at once plus working in groups ensures lively discussion on these important English topics and the themes within them
• Engaging – students learn about Shakespeare plays in an interactive way rather than passively reading a chunk of text; topics are split up into snippets with pictures so they’re easier to digest
• Retention – users are asked to create groups and think of names for them then lay them out in a sequence… these two different perspectives of looking at the same information mean they remember more
• Deep learning – multiple discussion points and the open-ended nature of questions help students get fully immersed in the task

Three ways to try it now:

• iPad – Search 'Digital Mysteries Shakespeare' on the App Store now.
  
  Individual: The apps have been reduced to 79p/99¢/AU $1.49 FROM £1.49/US $1.99/AU $2.99.
  
  A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth.
  
  Bundle: The app bundle works out at 3 for LESS than the price of 2! So £1.49/US $1.99/AU $2.99.
  
  Digital Mysteries: Shakespeare Bundle  
  
  
• Windows PCs and laptops
  
  Click here to download a 28 day free trial (or send this to your ICT team) – this includes all three Shakespeare mysteries plus more such as Of Mice and Men and Lord of the Flies
  
  
• Paper task of Romeo and Juliet
  
  We can provide a PDF of the slips for this task for you to print off , just click here and put in the comments box 'RomeoandJuliet-paper'

Want to create your own iPad activities? Click here for new tool, the Thinking Kit.

Happy 1st birthday to Digital Mysteries

This week (Friday) marks the first birthday of Digital Mysteries apps for iPads! It was on the 13th of November 2014 that our very first iPad app came out. This is one of the various free ‘samples’ we have on the store now and has three full ‘mysteries’ for 7-11 year olds.

Now, we have 38 apps on the App Store; 17 for 7-11 year olds and 21 for 11-16 year olds. Topics range from Ancient Greece to computer networking (with an exciting island) to volcanic eruptions to Romeo & Juliet. We have made some of our apps FREE and others half-price to celebrate (until 24th November)!

These apps have now been downloaded in 69 different countries. We love that teachers all over the world are helping students develop key skills of collaborative learning and higher level thinking AT THE SAME TIME as they cover the topics many schools have to learn about.

If you haven’t heard of Digital Mysteries before, the full range can be viewed on our website or in the App Store on our Developer page.

In summary though, they are apps designed to be used by pairs or small groups. Most mysteries ask students one main open question then give them lots of different digestible snippets of illustrated information on the screen. They must then work together to make sense of that information, link different ideas together and discuss how they can answer that question. All the actions are recorded too, so students and teachers can go through a short Reflection Stage at the end and/or get a PDF report.

They were developed following years of research by Dr. Ahmed Kharrufa, who researches the impact technology can have on various elements of learning. If you’re interested in the papers on such topics, please go to our research section.

To celebrate our birthday, we have decided to make 6 of our apps completely free and another 6 of our most popular apps almost half-price! This price drop will last for 12 days: one for every month that Digital Mysteries have been on the App Store. We hope you enjoy using them and would love to hear from you once you’ve explored the mysteries with your students.

These apps (except Amy) are usually £1.49 UK, $1.99 US, $2.99 AU.

Apps for 7-11 year olds now half price:

• Jenny's Shadow (Science)
• Theo in Ancient Greece (History)
• Trev the Triff (Mathematics)

Apps for 11-16 year olds now half price:

• Earthquakes (Haiti case study)
• Volcanic eruptions
• WW1 Trenches

Apps for 7-11 year olds now free:

• Amy (Citizenship/PSHE/English)
• Where does Pebbles live? (Science)
• Cup and Ring Marks (History)

Apps for 11-16 year olds now free:

• Flooding in Bangladesh
• Roaring Twenties
• 1933 German Election

If pre-existing content isn’t your thing, we are almost ready to release a new tool ‘Thinking Kit’ which lets you create YOUR OWN mystery-like activities for iPads. If you want to hear more about this, comment ‘TK’ on our form and we’ll let you know when you can have a one month FREE trial of the Thinking Kit Creator. The apps to use these created activities on will be free.

Thanks,
Natalie