30hands - From Flipped Learning to Digital Narrative

I’ve just been looking over the 30hands Pro app for the iPad.

30hands is a simple to use app and community for the development and sharing of instructional presentations and videos.

The app itself enables you to either upload an existing slide deck, video or images from your computer , Google Drive or Dropbox , or create your own slideshow within the app using the drawing tools within the application.

Once your slides have been created or added you can then record a narrative over each slide and also annotate the slides using the drawing features.

Once your slide sequence and recording is complete you have a number of options for sharing it. You can export it as a video, save it to either DropBox or Google Drive or add it to the 30hands community site.

The community site has a really wide collection of example presentations and you can either view these as individual slides with their recordings or watch them as video.

If you are a community member you can also download the videos and the project files and this will allow you to edit, adapt and build your own version of the presentation for your students.

Using 30hands with students

• This is a great tool to create flipped learning video content. There’s loads of variety in what you can do, from uploading and enhancing your existing presentations with audio and annotation to creating unique slides and integrating images and video.
• You can also use the app to create digital narrative using images from around the internet (Pixabay and Unsplash are two great places to find royalty free images) or you can use your mobile device to capture images and video and then add your own narrative voiceovers.
• This is also a great tool for capturing student project work and for enabling student to do project reports. They can just grab images or upload their work and then add a narrative voiceover explaining their learning outcomes.

30hands works as a native app on iOS or can run in the Chrome browser on other devices so it can also be used in the BYOD classroom.

This is a great tool to enable teachers to create materials or to put in the hands of students to help develop their digital literacies and make learning tangible with genuine outputs that they can collect into a digital portfolio.

• Check out the 30hands Community
• Download the 30hands Starter app ($1.99)
• Download the 30hand Pro app ($6.99)
• Check out 30hands in the Chrome browser
• Find out about whole school deals

I hope you enjoy using this app with your students.

My Books:

• 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom
• Digital Tools for Teachers
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media
• Exploiting Infographics
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teachers 

 Best

Nik Peachey

Intercultural Project Based Learning for Students

This is a fantastic idea for creating intercultural exchange projects with students from different schools around the world.

The site has a really wide variety of really interesting projects that you can choose from and they are really well designed and structured with learning goals, levels and age appropriacy clearly sign posted.

In order to register on the site as a teacher you have to be located at a physical school which you identify when you sign up.

Once this is done you can select your project and get your students registered using a class code that you find on your dashboard.

The site automatically matches your class up to another class somewhere around the world. Class match ups are done every Monday.
Then your students will need to commit 30 - 45 mins each week for the length of the project (usually about 6 weeks)

All the materials are provided and the students just need a device (the service works on most devices) and an internet connection.
You can find out more about the details here: https://www.penpalschools.com/faq.html

PenPal Schools is free for the first 5 teachers at any school, after that the school has to buy a licence.

This looks like a really cleverly designed way to get your students engaging with other schools around the world.

You can find links to many more tools like this and activities for the digital classroom in my ebooks at: http://peacheypublications.com/. All my ebooks are available for iOS and as PDF.

Sign up for my twice monthly free newsletter and get a free copy of Digital Tools for Teachers at: https://tinyletter.com/technogogy/ 

My eBooks:

• 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom
• Digital Tools for Teachers
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media
• Exploiting Infographics
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teachers

Best
Nik Peachey