Using iPads in the Primary Grades Recently, I was given the opportunity to go one-to-one in my first grade classroom with iPads. To say that my students and I were excited to do this would be a bit of an understatement. It has long been a dream of mine to go one-to-one and for the students it is, as they say, like kids in a candy shop. With Great Tools Comes Great Responsibility When I announced on Twitter that I had picked up my boxes of technology, a comment from Stephen Ransom gave me great pause. He said, “With great tools comes great responsibility. Wow. If they become a babysitting tool, then I have failed. Starting Our Journey With that in mind, I was careful which apps I chose to put on the iPads initially. I thought a lot about the set up of my classroom and about how to keep the iPads from getting broken, but still allow the students to easily use them whenever and wherever they wanted to. Engagement Truthfully, it is not really difficult to engage six-year-old students. Collaboration Instant Feedback Connections
12 Tools for Quickly Gathering Informal Feedback from Students This morning I'm again facilitating a workshop with Greg Kulowiec. At the start of the session we introduced three tools for quickly gathering informal feedback from students. The three that we introduced were Socrative, Poll Everywhere, and TodaysMeet. But there are many other tools for quickly gathering informal feedback from students. Here are twelve tools that you can use to quickly gather informal feedback from students. Urtak is a free and simple polling service that can be used on any blog or website. Kwiqpoll is a simple tool for quickly creating and posting polls. Hall.com is a service for quickly creating and hosting online collaboration spaces. Understoodit is a new web app for quickly gauging your students' understanding of information that you have shared with them. Simple Meet Me is a free service for quickly creating an online chat room with anyone you like. Socrative is a system that uses cell phones and or laptops (user's choice) for gathering feedback from students.
Learning with iPads Developing iPad learning workflows for best learning outcomes — learningwithipads.blogspot Rethinking the approach to learning with an iPad was one of the key points that arose from our recent iPad study tour in Queensland. Many of the schools talked about the development of 'Learning Workflows' where work is created in one app, then built on in another App and so on. Using the iPad where many Apps are generally single function, requires a different approach to create useful learning outcomes that moves the integration of the iPad in learning from the Subsitution model to the Redefinition model. A very useful explanation with some practical examples of how to achieve a learning workflow in your classroom can be found in the following video by ELearning Laura based on work done at the Apple Teacher Institute 2012 in Cheltenham. Read the full post with more details at: Elearning Laura - Video iPad lesson workflows Bounty Boulevard State School, one of the schools we toured, also had a very useful handout towards creating a 'Learning Workflow' available from their iPad portal.
Why the iPad Works for Writing When the first iPad launched in 2010, critics were quick to lampoon the device for being geared too heavily toward content consumption. The criticisms weren't entirely without merit, especially considering that the first-generation iPad didn't even have a camera, and external media slots are still nowhere to be found. Over time, the iPad has evolved into something that's much more creation-friendly. It still doesn't compare to a desktop or laptop computer for many things, but it's great for quite a few others. Writing is one of them. I happen to write things for a living, but the practice is far from limited to those who earn a paycheck by doing it. It's Easier to Focus One of the aforementioned early criticisms actually turns out to be part of what makes the iPad ideal for writing. To be sure, there are distraction-free writing apps for Windows and Mac desktops, and it's not exactly rocket science to simply close one's IM, email and Twitter clients for an hour or two.
18 Snapshots Of iPad Integration You know from experience that when you enjoy a subject, learning about that subject is easier, more fun, and you retain the information longer. Getting kids to enjoy learning is more productive to education efforts than spending more money, lengthening school days, you name it. This is the reason many educators are excited about the possibilities inherent to the iPad. More than 600 school districts in America have brought iPads into the classroom. Motion Math in Class: An assistant professor of education at USC’s Rossier School oversaw this study looking at whether having students play a learning game to teach them fractions increased their knowledge. Oklahoma State University iPad Pilot Program: OSU experimented with iPads in five classes in the fall of 2010. This is a cross-post from content-partners at onlineuniversities.com
The Challenge of iPad Pedagogy Staff training completed. Make no bones about it, the use of the word completed couldn’t be further from the truth. My advice to anyone else undertaking an iPad trial, be more than prepared. Imagine the most challenging class you have ever had to personalise learning for and double it. The challenge lies in the pedagogy. Exposure to app use, productivity and possible implications has opened up the proverbial can of worms, and it’s fantastic. Whether you subscribe to the device as a consumption, creation or discovery tool, the technology opens the eyes of educators when given time to investigate. Not that I didn’t have my own ideas! It just feels like the trial has a real chance of success and not because of the new technology. So what to do next? The challenge of pedagogy demands contact time between staff, students and those of us charged with coordinating. It’s a challenge and it’s not about the technology! Like this: Like Loading...
The iPad as a research tool I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog lately reflecting on Big Education ideas. During that time, my little buddy the iPad has felt a little neglected and unloved. So I thought I’d get back to talking about everybody’s “favourite little tablet that could”. Today, I want to explore the possibilities the iPad has as a tool for researching information. As I’ve said many times, what I describe here can be done on laptops but the purpose of this post is to show how the iPad can be used for all tasks if you have decided to use iPads as your main computer. One criticism of the iPad is that it has the “one app open at a time” limitation. WikiNodes is a different way of browsing and collecting information from Wikipedia. A welcome extra feature is how WikiNodes allows the user to save, store and organize information from the Wikipedia article. Notability, which I’ve mentioned in previous posts, is a versatile note taking app that I think has some useful features for research.
iPads in schools! They just play games! | IPAD 4 SCHOOLS 20th Century pedagogy + iPads = Gaming So, you’re in your classroom and annoyed that the kids are playing games on the iPads. You have devised a strategy and at random intervals, you ask them to double-click the ‘Home’ button to see the last apps used. Great! Well done on controlling the situation so they can get on with: writing their notes;Reading their e-textbook;completing their essay or‘Researching’ on the Internet. The only step forward you’ve really seen is the ability to use that Shakespeare app or Dissecting Frog app. The parents too, have complained that all they seem to see is game playing and maybe your school is considering limiting the apps allowed on the devices. Well done on introducing iPads. Now you have introduced a radically new and powerful learning device, you need to update your pedagogy to match it. Why are these issues the most important? Like the iPad, learning is personal This is not what the iPad was designed for. Like this: Like Loading... Related In "21C Learning"
50 resources for iPad use in the classroom The transition to the more extensive use of technology in classrooms across the West has resulted in the integration of bring your own device (BYOD) schemes, equipping students with netbooks and tablet computers, and lessons that use social media & online services. Gesture-based technology is on the rise; according to the latest NMC Horizon Report, gesture-based technological models will become more readily integrated as a method of learning within the next few years. The iPhone, iPad, Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Xbox 360 Kinect technology are examples of these kinds of developments, and in particular, resources for Apple products in education are becoming widely available online. For teachers, some of which are just beginning to use tablets and mobile devices in class, these resources can be invaluable in promoting more interactive classrooms and understanding how best to use and control such products. Tutorials: 1.) iPads for learning: Getting started 2.) 3.) 50 iPad2 tips and tricks 6.)
Free Internet lessons challenge textbook market for public schools “I don’t really use my traditional textbooks,” Shulman said. “There’s almost too much good stuff online.” Enterprising teachers have long scoured the Internet for ways to improve on their textbooks or local curricula. Now, though, lessons accessed via the Web are proliferating in the classroom as never before and are challenging the position of the powerful education-publishing industry in public schools. Fueling the trend, most states in the past two years have embraced national standards for what students should learn in English and math classes. As classrooms become better equipped with interactive white boards and other gadgets, more teachers are looking for digital content and adopting an assumption that prevails in much of the World Wide Web: That content should be free. “Now that expectation has entered the American classroom,” said Jay Diskey, executive director for the school division of the Association of American Publishers. U.S.