iPad in teaching and learning

I love my iPad. I thought that I would be able to manage with a laptop and an iPhone, but I can't be parted from it.

Our school has an 1-2-1 iPad scheme, so I was really excited today to attend the iPad teaching and learning day at Rachel Jones' school Kind Edward School in Southampton. It was free, and it was in our holidays so three of us went from my school.

This has been one of the few external training events I have been to with colleagues. That was great. I know that science learning centres research says that training courses have more impact when more than one person from the same school attends and I certainly felt that was true from today. 

For my birthday I got a pencil 53 from paper 53. I was feeling inspired by the sketchnote pins I have seen Lucie Golton put on pinterest, and wanted to try this approach in recording the conference. 

I found the comments from Bob Allen the deputy head at King Edward VI School the most interesting. He obviously did a lot of research into the aims of introducing a 1-2-1 scheme. He explained the errors that were made in looking more into WHAT? than HOW? and WHY? He discussed that WHY? should have been the most important. 

Does a 1-2-1 scheme reduce the amount of paper being used? (This is one of the aims at my current school), does it reduce the number of ICT suites needed in a school? (Not the experience of KES). Does it enhance learning? Is there another reason to introduce a scheme, such as SLT thinking iPads are cool as they are shiny and new? After the introduction of our scheme I wrote a blog post about ICT savvy students. I think that the aims need to be related to giving students the ICT and digital skills necessary for when they leave school. The things that formal qualifications don't currently teach.

Over the course of the day the theme that came up was 'TIME and SPACE'. KES staff had four training days with time devoted to the implementation of the 1-2-1 scheme. Bob Allen explained that during this lead up time the enthusiasm of staff rose and fell.  The support for staff at KES was flexible, and included training by experts. Throughout the implementation SLT were honest with staff, admitting mistakes. The school consulted and engaged parents, even running 10 sessions for them. 

In Bob Allen's later session I was impressed by the amount of knowledge he had regarding iPad implementation.  What I was interested in was that he was connected to many other schools and following their implementation journeys with interest. I do think that this type of network is important in the implementation. Learning from the experiences of each other can only be a good thing. 

I have to say that I didn't do any doodling on my iPad during Rachel Jones' session as we were using nearpod, so I was looking at my screen and engaging through the feedback activities. However, I was interested by this diagram:

It is important now to ensure that teachers have knowledge of how to use technology in lessons as well as their subject and pedagogical knowledge. I suppose my question is what does this technological knowledge look like?

Things that came up during the day that I had not considered were age related apps. Some apps are rated 18+ because of the content that students might be able to reach through it. I didn't know about buying apps in bulk. I didn't realise that students could buy their iPads through the company stormfront and that buying 50 iPads gives 1 day of training. I didn't know there was an app for printing "paper cut". I had never considered the importance of students backing up their iPad. I really liked the idea of students being able to charge their iPads in the library at lunch and also being able to borrow battery packs during the day.

I know that Rachel was super proud of her digital leaders. They came to talk to the room at lunch time. From even just a short meeting it was possible to see the impact of them within the school. I hope that at some point our digital leaders can reach the same level of engagement with the 1-2-1 iPad project.

It was fairly obvious from all the presentations that the school had thought carefully about the roll out of iPads and staff were embracing the technologies (although to varying extents). It was also great to see how the school had learned from mistakes and were going forward. Rachel's energy for the project was obvious, but I think we already knew that.

My next steps are to look more closely at workflow and how to mark electronic work and give feedback. I would love students to send me their work electronically and the day has given me some ideas on how to do that. Firefly, Google classroom and Showbie were all mentioned as solutions to this. The way that firefly linked to the MIS looked really useful, so it can be used as an online student planner. We all went to useful sessions on workflow in the afternoon and I think that this will form a large part of our discussions back at school.

Thank you to all at King Edward VI School. A very useful, interesting and informative day. It was well organised and well pitched to reach a wide audience. It was also very generous of you to share your school and experiences (good and bad) with others of us on a 1-2-1 iPad journey, we appreciated it.

Adobe Voice

A useful app for creating short videos using their extensive graphics library and also adding sound. See the example. This has been embedded into the blog.

Socrative Quizzes

I want to use socrative to capture student's progress at the end of a lesson. So I have made a few short quizzes and will make some more.

If you would like to take a look at the first ones that I have done then the codes are below.

P1c A spectrum of waves (features of transverse waves and wave equation):12371027

P3a Speed (distance-time graphs): 12195705

P3b Changing Speed (speed-time graphs): 12198553

You can then import my quizzes. I hope there are minimal mistakes, but do let me know if you find a problem.

I think that it will be quicker to use the excel template to import questions and answers as it doesn't involve quite so much clicking.

Socrative

As I have mentioned before. The girls at my school will all be arriving at school in September with iPads in September. I want to make sure that I am utilising them from day one for two reasons. 1) I am interested in seeing how they can impact on my practice and 2) I want to make sure that the iPads are value for money for the families.

I am using explain everything, audio boo, nearpod, iDoceo, QR codes and pinterest. I have had a go at Aurasma and will continue to work on iBooks too, with a view to the new curriculum.

However, another tool I want to utilise is Socrative.

It is a website and app that allows students to answer multiple choice, true & false, and short answer questions.

It is possible to upload an image to the question, which is very useful for science questions. 

In the summer term I trialled this with a few classes using their mobile phones. They did find it hard to find the website and put in the room number to start with and there was some staggering of starts of the quizzes. I would hope to get over this as the students start to get familiar with the site and/or app (if they chose to download it). I also want to look at  using the teacher paced idea to help students keep up and not race ahead. 

I would also suggest that keeping a quiz short will help to reduce the time lag between the fast and slow finishers. I have perhaps made too many questions with 12.

After the quiz it is possible to download the report to see how students have got on. I am interested in doing this and uploading it to evernote and ultimately idoceo to help create better, personalised, feedback in reports and parents evening. 

I have also noticed that it is possible to download the quizzes and hand them out as paper resources. I think this really adds to socrative: It takes a long time to type a multiple choice test, but this means that it will be better to type it into socrative and get a paper or online test. Two birds, one stone. It will also mean I can keep a copy in my teaching file or give a copy to a student who forgets or breaks their iPad.

When I have completed all the work for P1/3/4 from the Gateway science GCSEs suite I will share the resources, including the socrative quiz numbers. 

Decisions Decisions; where to start when using ICT

I have said this before, but in September all the students will have 1-2-1 iPads. I have spent two days thinking about this opportunity. I would welcome suggestions and possible pitfalls.

One thing I have realised is that there is too much choice.

Do I use google, showbie, dropbox, onedrive, Evernote or what to share content with students? Do I create a blog? Will what I choose cause confusion if other staff go with something different? I have read about iTunesU, but I don't have permission to 'bind my institution to the terms and conditions'. Which is disappointing. I think that despite the enthusiasm on the internet for this, I will give it a miss for now.

However, after a recommendation from a colleague (who like me didn't get an iPad in the roll out) I have settled on nearpod as a starting point. I only get 50MB storage though, and probably need the gold package. However, as you can link to websites I should be able to link to youtube so won't need to upload videos and therefore manage to keep presentations small.

I do love the way that you can allow students to draw a picture as one of the actives in Nearpod, this means that I can allow students to show their working in physics and maths questions that are hard to type due to all the funny symbols. I might have to ask my students to consider a stylus though.

I think that I will ask my students to get an evernote account too. I feel that evernote is the best way to keep your lesson notes organised. Being able to tag notes will also help as well as being able to add photographs to notes. (Which reminds me, I must help students by adding suggestions for tags to my presentations, especially as you can also add tags in pages on the mac).

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/ipad-workflow-solutions-for-classroom-education.html
Until reading this article, I hadn't really considered the full idea of workflow. I have thought of how to get work from me to them, but not whether I want to get electronic work from them, mark it and send it back to them. At my previous school the Head of Chemistry used moodle to set all homework and loved that he could annotate the work that students did and they could see his comments.

I actually think that I would like my feedback to remain in their notebooks for now. There are a couple of reasons for this, firstly that I think the notebooks will be more ordered (as they will be chronological) than folders on their iPads. I don't want to have to get into how to keep work organised as I want to teach my lessons. I am not sure that I want to check their online folders for organisation, and I am not sure that they'll refer back to them anyway. When the inspectors come in they will want to see exercise books and folders, and I am not sure I can produce electronic resources for every lesson anyway. So even if students take electronic notes, they will likely be answering questions on worksheets. The exercise book also allows me a quick flick back to reference previous targets I have written and their contexts. ISI are due this year, and I suppose in another 5 years when they come back we will have moved on and so will they.

In the past two days I have started to write a list of videos that I would like to make. I wrote a script then I had a quick go with explain everything today, I wasn't happy, but we have to start somewhere. I think that I want to make my own graphics to include, so I need to think about how I will construct them.

I am very keen to look at online testing. Nearpod will allow this, but also socrative and googleforms. I have access for key stage 3 to activate and I hope that this will allow testing and recording of the responses. I had a look at quizlet today and I can really see how useful this would be for MFL. I think that I will borrow a textbook and use the glossary in the back to help populate quizlet for GCSE as this should help some of the girls who struggle with key words. I wish it would allow images.

I know I don't want to just produce resources that may or may not be looked at as part of revision. My GCSE Science and BBC bitesize are already there. Often students look in the revision guide and still need to come to me or have another look at the experiment. This year I found myself saying to students "you don't need to understand why an electric current is produced when a magnet moves relative to a coil, you just need to know that it happens, describe how to make it bigger and why the current would change direction". They wouldn't get that feedback from a video. However, being able to have that kind of conversation because the students have more time to answer questions that draw out their knowledge is appealing to me. I hope that technology will help with this.

I foresee a busy, but creative summer ahead.