The second transnational meeting for the A is for App initiative took place on the 15-16th of May 2019 in Sheffield in the UK.
Partners from all 11 institutions across four nations (the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and the Czech Republic) attended a series of meetings and discussion groups over the two days. A key aim for the meeting was to select the best reading fluency apps to “road test” in the UK, Netherlands and Belgium during the school summer term.
Following Professor Pol Ghesquière’s in depth evaluation of the characteristics the apps have to possess to be used in the latter part of the project, the teams from Belgium and the Netherlands presented their selection of apps to the rest of the group (these will be posted on the site soon).
The UK team then gave an update on their selection process and, by the end of the meeting, provided their choices of apps to be piloted. This was followed by discussions on the best ways to test the chosen apps in the school setting as well as the development of an online Teacher Toolkit which will provide resources for more general use of literacy apps in primary school classrooms (use the sign-up sheet on our home page to get updates on when this is released).
We also heard great presentations about translating research into app development (from Sebastian Aravena), intervention and backend (from Alexander Krepel), computer science (by Stuart Cunningham) and a showcase of education and healthcare apps (by Olivier Hokke).
For the next transnational meeting, we will be in Prague - watch this space for updates from our brainstorming sessions there in September!