Learning together

Although our school has been 1:1 for several years, this is our first year with iPads, which the freshmen only have been toting around and using in classes.

The iPad, and anything Apple for that matter, were brand new to me as of one year ago. I still have much to learn. I had an idea about having groups of freshmen each create one slide of a Google Presentation. I had it all set up, ready to go when I discovered that the iPad (as far as I can figure out) allows for viewing of the presentations, but not creation.

A colleague suggested Keynote, so that's what we did; students emailed me their slides. Next came the decision about the easiest way to put those slides together. I loved that students had lots of suggestions about the best way to do this, making use of and wanting to share knowledge of workflow methods that they have gained throughout the year.

I hope tomorrow to have a great little presentation on the Ten Commandments to share with the whole class.

Do you have a suggestion for the best way for a class to collaborate on a presentation with iPads? Is there an app for that?

iMovie

Really. I did not expect to spend what amounted to most of an afternoon putting together a five-minute video. But once I shot the video clips and the photos this morning, I could not keep myself away.

Because... it is fun.

I'm talking about making a movie with iMovie on the iPad. I've done a couple of videos with MovieMaker and have enjoyed that, too, which I mention just so that our associate principal doesn't think I've been converted totally to an Apple person.

The iMovie app is pretty intuitive, and my questions were mostly answered in a very helpful "help" section. What took me the longest, even though I had used iMove once before, was getting the hang of dragging the yellow circles to get fine control in my editing. I think I've got it now.

There's one of my "10 things" summer homework for teachers at my school, crossed off the list!

Explain Everything

I received a forwarded e-mail with a question about Evernote, simply because I am someone who uses Evernote, and I have researched it a bit for PD demo at our school. I don't exactly know all the ins and outs, especially with the iPad, so I looked online for the answer. The question was about sharing a link for a note, which apparently one can do on a computer but not on the iPad, where the sharing option is limited to notebooks.

So then, because one of our "assignments" this summer is to make a demonstration video with either the Explain Everything or Show Me app, I decided to get in some of my practice on the iPad by showing in a visual format what I had just learned about sharing notebooks .

I had been to a short demonstration of Explain Everything, but even if I had not, I think I still could have figured out how to use it, because it's pretty intuitive. The longest part of the process was probably taking my screenshots, but once I had my camera roll ready to go, it was a fairly quick job to pull up a shot for each slide, record and draw. The actual processing of the video took some minutes, a good time for (as suggested by the EE people) a "screen break."

I like it! Now I'll be thinking about how I can apply this application to my curriculum.

Evernote

Nothing to facilitate learning like agreeing to "bone up" to present the intermediate version of an app that I've been using in "beginner" fashion. But the more I learn about Evernote, the more I like it.

Mostly I just type lots of notes -- short and long -- things I want to remember and have accessible from any device. Books and movies people recommend. Notes about students to have on hand if I talk to parents. Agenda items for meetings. I haven't been interested in saving website articles that way, because I find Diigo to work quite well for the volume of links I save.

But with the iPad and the ability to take photos and record audio, more possibilities are opened up. I'm pretty impressed at how well the search function works, even finding words within photos of text or of my worst handwriting. Perhaps I will be finding new uses for Evernote.

Decisions, decisions

As we move from PC to iPad in our school, I have some things to figure out in terms of organization. I've been using One Note for all of my meetings and Evernote for just about every other note I type. I think there's a way to keep using One Note, and to sync it to all my devices. Should I learn that, or just stick everything in Evernote now?

We will be storing in the cloud, and Dropbox is the place that's been hyped around here so far. But Google just came out with Google Drive, and we're doing lots more Google. Would it be simpler to keep it in the family, so to speak?

I'll be making decisions about calendars. We have recently added a school Google calendar, and that's where my class calendars will go in the fall. If I keep the separate one I have in my personal (already existing) account, will I risk double-booking myself? I've already done that once, and we've barely begun. It's easy to switch from one calendar to another, but will I remember to do that? Maybe it's just as well to keep everything in one place.

It's going to be an interesting year, on many levels.

Moodle rubrics

I have mentioned before that I am glad to see the introduction of rubrics to our Moodle experience. I am experimenting now with a couple of sets of essay papers.

I have had to learn some of the quirks. It is not possible to edit a rubric once it has been attached to an assignment. So, if there is a mistake, take it off the assignment first before trying to make changes.

Unfortunately, our version only offers two rubric choices, and neither fits what I really want. I am using a "checklist" type, and it requires me to check many boxes, which can get tedious. I would like to set it up so that only the highest applicable box needs to be checked.

Because of that tedium, I tried using the iPad, figuring it would be faster to just tap. The problem there was getting from the rubric to the paper and back efficiently. There might be a way, but I don't know it since the iPad experience is still fairly new for me. I tried using both the iPad and my PC at the same time, but didn't work, either.

So, back to the computer. After about ten papers, I think this method is at least as good as what I had been doing before, copying the grading criteria to each grading box and entering points for each one. I'm just not sure yet if it's better.

iPad vs. PC

We are transitioning from tablet PC's to iPads in our school, so for the time being I have one of each to work with. I've been trying to get acquainted with the iOS realm, but I still go back to the laptop for some things. Here are my thoughts of the day:

Why I like my iPad:

It's lighter and easier to carry around.
The screen resolution shows off my photos nicely.
I can take photos (other than of me).
It's easier to scroll up and down on the attendance screens. (Hardly a big deal, but something I do several times a day.)
Word files for quick grading in Moodle open up instantly.

Why I like my tablet PC:

Typing! Much easier to offer comments in grading on Moodle.
Full functioning of all the apps I use. (Pretty important.)
Much easier to navigate around on the web and between apps, at least so far. (I'm learning...)
The screen doesn't get smudged constantly.