“As a teacher, the iPad has helped me expand my didactic repertoire, diversify my lessons, and flexibly respond to and visualize students’ expressions.”
Your new online training is about iPads in religious education. What possibilities does the iPad offer for contemporary religious education?
Kathrin Termin: The iPad offers a wide range of possibilities. On the one hand, it can be used by the teacher to perform an image viewing with advanced features or to prepare an interactive exploration of an out-of-school learning site. On the other hand, the students can use the iPad to produce creative and impressive learning products, so that their media skills are promoted at the same time. In addition, students grow up with digital media, and digital media such as smartphones and/or iPads play an essential role in their biography. The lifeworld of the students is determined by the consumption of digital media. A contemporary religion class uses iPads purposefully to move students from a consumer mindset to a producer mindset and to focus on the four Cs (collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and communication).
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Your online training is based on the four competency areas of religious education: judgment, methodological, interpretive, and perceptual competency. How can the iPad help to promote precisely these competencies?
Kathrin Termin: Judgment skills can be fostered through guided internet research and recommended search engines for religious education, enabling students to apply their developed point of view to an explainer film using the research results and the iPad. In order to promote methodological skills, the iPad can be used for digital image viewing, so that a work of art can be developed together in a criterion-guided manner and a creative engagement of the students with the image is made possible, for example, by using the app Photos with speech bubbles or the app ChatterPix to bring the image to life with their own voice.
Interpretive skills can be fostered through working with Bible stories by having students structure the story using the app Keynote or come up with alternative scenarios to a Bible story using the app Stopmotion.
Exploring out-of-school places with the iPad also promotes perceptual competence and at the same time offers the opportunity to present students’ impressions in the classroom.