The countdown to Christmas has begun! With people opening the first door on their advent calendars and starting a month of chocolate for breakfast, here at Turn IT On some of our consultants have been teaching children to create interactive advent calendars.

At St Andrews C of E School in Headington and Stockham County Primary School children have created a countdown for the December school days. Behind each door is a video of staff and the children wearing Christmas hats and tinsel singing songs, telling jokes and sharing Christmas facts. Both schools filmed the videos themselves using iPads before editing them using the free app PicCollage to add backgrounds, stickers and text to the video clips along with creating the main cover image with the advent numbers. The classes at Stockham then used the free app ThinkLink which allowed them to embed the video content to the background image, effectively hiding the video clips behind the numbers. At St Andrews they used Microsoft PowerPoint to create their calendar, using a free template within PowerPoint then adding their own video clips behind each door.

Both classes thoroughly enjoyed getting in the Christmas spirit and are looking forward to seeing the final result unveil throughout the month.

Making your own interactive calendars is fun and simple, for help using ThinkLink click here and to use PowerPoint click here.

We would love to hear how you are counting down to Christmas at your school, tweet us your celebrations to @TurnITOnSupport