Board work

Sometimes I still like to have students write on the board. It's low tech, but it gets students out of their seats and it's a change of pace from always having eyes on a screen while working. The change now is that I don't have to worry about accomplishing everything within one class period.

Students today worked together in groups putting on chalkboards everything they could think of that they know so far about the persons of the Trinity. This happened toward the end of the period, and of course by the time I see these students again the boards will be erased. I took pictures with the iPad and uploaded the photos to our class website. (I used PicMonkey to reduce the size of the photos to something easier to see on the website page.)

Now the boardwork that would have been a fleeting thing in the past is available to us in future classes for further comment, and available as well to students outside of the classroom.

Google Docs, Google Sites or Wikispaces?

I'm always trying to decide what is the right tool for the job. If it's a one-time thing that's just about writing,  probably a doc for each group or even the whole class is enough. But if there will be files or media posted, or if there will be multiple projects, then I go back and forth between Sites and Wikispaces.

I did not use Wikispaces at all last year because our school has gone over to Google apps in a major way, so I thought I would be consistent. But W. does have their project feature, after all, and as I have discovered, even a category expressly aimed at the classroom. Here's what got me to experiment again this year, with one of my classes: the "assessment" feature. A graph can show for each student how much she has been engaged on the wiki. I'm not sure if that will save me from tedious searches of students' posts, but I want to find out.

It seems that in Wikispaces I can't give regular pages a hierarchy, though maybe I'm missing something. In Sites when I create a page I can always choose to nest it under a previously created page. Also, when I tried forming teams in the projects section, the editing was acting weird and it was time consuming; I hope that was a fluke.

Today JP groups will start posting research results. The experiment begins.

Haiku Deck

Fairly recently our school added PowerPoint/Keynote to the already great Speech class that all frosh take, and last year freshmen began to take a course called Design Foundations, an art course that also encompasses design for electronic media. Fantastic stuff. But, my current 80 freshmen won't see any of this until next semester.

This is one reason I was excited to discover Haiku Deck this summer. My students have begun a little project in which they will, I hope, review and present in a graphic form some of what they have learned in the first section of our book. I don't want to spend a lot of time teaching things they will learn soon enough, but I did introduce them to the concept of Creative Commons and needing permission to use photos that might be displayed on the internet.

Haiku Deck takes care of that, so they don't have to. It's possible to search only for CC photos. A link automatically appears displaying the photographer's name, and another link connects to the photographer's Flickr page for full information.

In terms of design, students will learn, next semester, to Keep It Simple... Sweetie. Haiku Deck does that, too. The amount of information that can be placed on a slide is limited, so there will be no slides packed with words; I am hoping students will be forced to synthesize information they have learned. If they choose good photos, the likelihood of a nicely designed, good-looking slide "deck" is great -- I think!

I'm looking forward to seeing the results within the next couple of days. As much as I love Haiku Deck, I am thinking that when I have second-semester freshmen I will do this particular project with Keynote so that students can practice their newly-learned skills from the previous semester.

Back to blogging?

Just for the value of reflecting and recording, I hope to put into written word (again) some of what happens in my classroom this year. We'll see if I am able to keep it up or not! If anyone else lands here and finds any of what I have to say at all useful, that will be a bonus.

One notable thing about the beginning of our school year a little over two weeks ago has to do with frosh tech orientation, for the first time completely student led. I was just the observer/extra helper while two sophomores in my assigned session shared with our newest students the ins and outs of Pages for their iPads. These two, along with all the iWizards, were very well prepared by associate principal Larry Baker. It was such a gratifying experience to see students take on this leadership role, and the new setup of groups rotating to different sessions/topics seemed to work very well.

Over the summer I got my feet wet with iBook Author as part of a committee making a book to explain about how technology is integrated into our school. Working with a Macbook for the first time was frustrating, but helped to prepare me for the Macbook Air that replaces the PC laptops we have carted around for several years. It's sort of like operating in a non-native language, but I am learning bit by bit. As far as iBooks go, a colleague and I may create one, or a series of them, for a course we teach that has a supplementary book but no actual text.

I have redesigned plans for my other two courses this year, adding more variation in assessment to the frosh course, and more learning by discovery and collaboration to the Justice and Peace course. Taking stock now and then in this space will help me decide on future direction for each of these courses.

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.