I’ve recently been exploring the world of App Smashing as a way to create digital stories with students. The use of several apps, rather than relying on a single app to ‘do everything’, more closely mirrors real world applications. Ask any multi-media developer, film-maker or videographer and they will likely report the use a suite of applications to get the job done. By engaging our students in a more authentic process and by utilizing the distinct and various affordances of mobile technologies, we are helping to redefine learning opportunities.
In an earlier post, I discussed the SAMR ladder – Ruben Puentedura’s suggestion for evaluating the learning value of various technologies. According to Puentadura, at the lowest levels of the ladder (substitution and augmentation), little increased learning occurs. It is only at the highest levels (modification and redefinition), that we see significant gains in student learning. I see huge potential with App Smashing for climbing the SAMR ladder! View this site for a ‘quick guide’ to SAMR for teachers.
The following are some resources by Greg Kulowiec, who, I believe, coined the term ‘App Smashing’. Check them out. Learn to engage your students in creating their own content using various apps. Try out a few different applications (ipad, tablet, smartphone and cloud) and see what you can create!
What is an App Smash? – Greg Kulowiec shares the term in this blog post to describe the use of several different apps to allow students to create an enhanced multi-media project – in this case, a timeline for a social studies project. Often, App Smashing is used in terms of collaborative content co-creation – a powerful approach! Imagine, students can each be creating parts of a production on their ipads, share to their camera roles, share via email or the cloud and then co-create a single project (or several complimentary projects perhaps!).
In general, you can follow these steps to ‘smash’ ‘Greg-style’:
- Create content with one app
- Create content with another app
- Merge the content together
- Publish the content to the web
In this post, Greg models a more complex app smash to create and share student created multimedia on a blog (he uses blogger, but you can easily do the same in WordPress).
Try this: In our sandbox session, we tested out an app smash using Explain Everything (a robust whiteboard style app), Tellagami (to create your own speaking avatar) and iMovie to smash it all together!
Other Resources:
Greg’s slides introducing App Smashing
The Definitive App Smashing Guide
How have you Smashed? Seek and Share ideas using #ettipad
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