With tablets becoming common place in schools a common question I am asked is can they be used to communicate with the Interactive Whiteboard that is already in place at school? The simple answer is yes! There are many companies selling solutions but all have slightly different uses and features. My biggest problem in school is money, our budget is almost non-existent and I am passionate about exploring free alternatives and solutions. When I spoke to our technician he quoted a screen sharing service but with a cost implication of almost £300! In essence these programs are just remote desktop access for tablets. With a little research I was able to implement my own service for free! I hope to explain below how!

NetTop Classroom Management is a tool a discovered at last years BETT show. They had a fantastic live presentation which engaged all people watching. It allows the teacher in the classroom to share their screen with the students Ipads and smartphones.
The software also allows for the students to annotate over the screen and adds a useful toolbar to link into classroom management.
The only downfall to this system is the cheapest package, for 1x Teacher and 15x Students is $499! I huge chunk in any schools budget.

Splashtop Streamer is a service that has been with us for a few years now and offers free remote desktop access for Android and IOs devices. It requires you to install the server software on your target PC and then download a small APP. Once signed up and registered connection between devices is simple, just enter your email and away you go! I used this APP in class when I first got my tablets but the limitation was that only one device could connect to my computer at once, which made class collaboration impossible. I needed a solution that would allow all of my tablets to interact with my main PC at the same time.

After a lot of researching I discovered a great piece of software for my class PC called "Real VNC" it comes as a two part package, the server and the client. The server is the part that we are interested in. This server is a small application that runs in the background when you first turn your PC on, it then allows any device (Tablet or PC) to then connect directly using any free VNC viewer software or APP. Real VNC allows infinite amount of connections so now all of my tablets can interact with my PC at the same time.
When my students connect to my computer my PC's display is then mirrored onto their display, creating a handheld version of my smart board. Now the children can do anything that I can do on my PC; Typing, Annotating, Dragging and Dropping, online games etc... but from their own device. I love doing shared writing like this as the children can actually add their ideas themselves!

As always, if you would like any advice or practical help with setting up a system please feel free to contact me!

@JholmesICT
Jholmes@somerset.gov.uk

With programming becoming such a crucial element of the new curriculum it is vital that children are introduced to a variety of hardware and software that allows the development of computational thinking.
The free APP from Lego provides a fantastic and fun way of getting children involved with programming from a young age! The App, called "Fix the Factory" allows children to guide a mind storms robot through a virtual factory using simple directional blocks, similar to the way you program a beebot. As the levels increase so do the available instructions until eventually your children are creating some very detailed and specific algorithms and they just think they are playing!
The children loved using this APP and the planning for sessions was fairly straightforward, similar to beebot activities but with more variables!
@JHolmesICT

With the computing curriculum looming it is important that the children are having a wide range of opportunities in school. Part of the new multimedia strand involves using Green Screen software with the children from KS1 upwards to manipulate live images. Tablets provide a fantastic opportunity to do this as you don't need to take the photos separately before adding the chroma key effect; this is easily achieved using a free APP called "Veescope Live," available on Itunes or Play store.

During book week my Year 1/2 class had been learning about "Hansel and Gretel." We spent the week sequencing the story and role playing as different characters to enable the children to fully understand the story.
We then created freeze frames of the key parts of the story in small groups which the children loved dressing up for! What they didn't know was that they were going to act these parts out with the real background behind them!
The looks on the children’s faces when they looked at the screen and saw themselves standing outside the witch's gingerbread house was fantastic!

After taking the photos of the children for all key parts of the story we transfered them to dropbox to enable all the children to access them. The children then imported their photos into an android APP called "Comic Strip It" which is a fantastic free APP to create great looking comics.

After a bit of input from me the children were soon able to sequence their images and then add speech bubbles and captions to their comics.
They really enjoyed making these comics and their eyes lit up when I said they could take them home!

For any help or lesson plans using these APP's please feel free to contact me!
@JHolmesICT
jholmes@educ.somerset.gov.uk

It’s an exciting and interesting time in the education world. Tablets and mobile devices in general have swept into the schools faster than any technology in the past — far faster than computers. In some cases, it has caught the schools off-guard and many have had to try to figure it out quickly. 

So to help us all consider the benefits and how to get the best from this technology - I am extremely pleased to give control of this blog to a Teacher from a Somerset School who is able to shed light on how to get the best from android tablets to enhance teaching and learning