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A month ago I was at home thinking how I was going to pose the paper What weeks later would I do at the I Congress of Early Childhood Education of Learning by Educating, and I realized that one of the things that I wanted to deal with during that hour and a half was how to work routines in the English classroom.

I thought about how I work routines in my classroom, I thought of songs, in games, rhyme, in routine calendars, I even thought about making a routine calendar and illustrating the process to share it with you. But I wanted to go even further and I said to myself: "Why not an app for children to work routines with the tablet or computer? Further, if made this type of app I will be able to use it in my classroom ”And… let's get to work!

Obviously, as you all know, I am not a programmer., so I lacked the person ready to execute the idea. As someone once told me: "An idea is worth nothing, what matters is to carry it out ”So I spoke with a very important person for me personally and professionally Álvaro Castro Castilla and with my best arguments, I convinced him that it would be a great idea that, above all, would contribute a lot to the educational community.

Once convinced I took all the ideas out of my head and captured them so that he could turn them into something real., “if you can imagine, can be programmed” or so they say. There are many factors that must be taken into account when developing an educational app and especially if we want it to be, Really educational.

In this post I want you to know how has it been, is being and will be the process of giving life to this small project What have I done first of all thinking of you.

First, Why the routines? Good, routines are structures that children assimilate en bloc from a young age. At first they do not know the meaning of each of the words that make up this structure, but if the global meaning. At first they state these structures mechanically, like your answer, but little by little they are using them in more meaningful contexts.

Routines are generally used in the classroom at the beginning of the day, are concepts like the days of the week, months of the year, the time ... that is, very basic concepts that will become the basis of learning that language.

These are the main routines that are worked in this app, obviously each question is accompanied by possible answers so that the little one can choose, but I wanted to put all the questions in a single image so that you can see what we are going to work on.

Why is this typeface? We have considered that the most appropriate for an app aimed at children between 2 and 6 years was a linked letter since, first, It is the one used for the little ones to learn to read and write, therefore it is the one they best recognize, further, the word is perceived as a unit, your own and personal style is promoted, and it is not easy for perceptual confusion to occur because the letters are clearly differentiated from each other.

Why have we highlighted words in red? As you will see, in red we have highlighted those words that really give meaning to the phrase, such as "weather", “day”, “wear”. They are the words with which we especially want the little ones to stay, that's why the use of red, because with this color we cause a visual impact and we make the child stay with the spelling of the word.

When it comes to explaining the functionality of the app I would like to ask you a question: What is the first thing your little ones do when they are in front of a mobile device? Touch the center of the screen hard, Truth? Well that is the main functionality of this app. What we wanted is to make it as easy and intuitive as possible, That's why it basically works by tapping or clicking with the mouse on the center of the screen. Once we find ourselves inside a question, the kids are clicking and LISTENING to the possible answers, to choose them they just have to drag the word, number or image to circle.

Once all the answers have been completed correctly the app automatically goes to the next question.

Obviously the application is prepared to automatically detect the day, month and year in which we are and in this way can give the answer as correct or incorrect.

How can the app know the weather today? The app has a geolocation system in which some parameters have been established so that the application detects the weather, in this way, when the child answers this question, the app will be detecting the weather in real time, obviously taking into account the possible intermediate nuances in time and when we are facing extreme weather all the answers will be considered correct.

Right now the application is under development and the images that I am showing you are of the prototype. Keep in mind, further, that during the process we have been detecting errors and nuances that we have to change. For example, in the date, the announcer says the numbers instead of the ordinal numbers, what will they say in the final version.

Then I leave you a small video so that you can see the state in which the application is and you get an idea of ​​how its usability will be.

I hope that the teachers see this useful application for use in your classroom and that the parents encourage you to review the routines in English with your children every day from the tablet.

Stay tuned!! I will inform you through the blog and social networks of the final launch date.

Thanks for your time.

Kisses to all,

Real progress is putting technology to everyone.

Henry Ford

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Tags: Applications, app, Educational Apps, learn English, Learning through play, Learning English, children

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 6th, 2014 at 4:55 pm and is filed under English, Technologies. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.