Yesterday I was working in Maureen’s class. She wanted me to start work on several projects with her class. The first of these projects was using Sam Animation in her numeracy programme. She wanted the students to create an animation using concrete materials such as units, tens, hundred’s and Thousands blocks to explain the process, algorithm, technique for subtraction over a 10, 100 or a 1000. The students storyboarded the process, organised the materials in their groups to explain and off they went.
After a little while it became clear that although SamAnimation could do the job of recording, a camera and iMovie in her case or Photostory in a Windows environment would have been perhaps more efficient. However that said, the process illuminated to Maureen a very interesting point. The students could do the maths, but could not articulate the logic of the mechanics of how they understood the maths to work. In other words they each had an algorithm down pat, but they did not fully understand the logic of that algorighm and therefore lacked full understanding. By introducing an elearning element into the numeracy lesson, Maureen has now got some concrete formative assessment data that she will now focus on. This information was only really fully revealed because of the videos the students created.
As you know I have long been an advocate of capturing student voice and this example demonstrates why. We may set up concrete examples on our tables for students to scaffold each other, but without some form of a capturing that conversation, we only see the end result and not the process and the misconceptions or fallacies. As far as Maureen was concerned, based on the results of her class, they all understood the process and mechanics of subtraction, but the student videos yesterday eloquently showed that they know the process but lack the understanding of how this works. Without the understanding, children will find it difficult to apply the process to other situations.
This weeks app of the week is the Rover app. There is much to love about the iPad but there is also much that is frustrating and one of those frustrations is it’s complete lack of support for all things Flash. As we know there is much content on the web that is Flash based and when viewed on the iPad a black space where once was content is all that is left. This is particularly frustrating for educators. The web is in a state of transition to HTML5 and a post Flash based world of media content. But for teachers who have assiduously collected links to many resources over the years, much of what they know to be good sites for learning are invisible to them via the iPad. Many legacy sites and even great current service providers, such as Mathletics are entirely Flash based and will take a long time, if ever to convert their sites from Flash to HTML5 and be a viable resource on the iPad.
This is where Rover comes in. It acts like a third party browser and enables you to use your trusted Flash based sites on your iPad. It is simple, and free and is my app of the week.
I was working at Bailey Road School today and it is really pleasing to see how far the school has progressed with its integration of elearning into the daily programme for students. Indeed I spent all morning working with students showing them how to create, edit, upload and embed videos. How to add images, videos and voice to Wallwisher stickies and then working with their respective teachers to ensure that the teachers could harness these skills and integrate the learning potential these tools and skills offer into their planning.
I had the pleasure of spending a part of the afternoon in Nat’s class. The school was running its three way conferencing and Nat has set up system where she is using Evernote with every child in her class and they are using Evernote as an LMS with every child responsible for uploading at least three examples of good work to their Evernote site every week. In addition in their notes are their test scores their AsTTle results as well as examples of their own work, their goals and evidence to demonstrate that they have attained their goals. The students then ran their three way conferences and were able to demonstrate to their parents what they had attained and where they were going next. Each parent has also been given the link to the Evernote site related to their child so that they can continue to drop in on the results and progress that each child will continue to make throughout the year. The beauty is that as it is a cloud based solution, each student can take their documentation to their next school.
An elegant solution, well done Nat. The video below shows one of the students running their conference and speaking to their Evernote hosted resources.
Audioboo is not a new service or a new app, but it is a good app. It is a great tool to use on your iOS devices and also as a web based service to capture student voice. And for that reason it is a winner, it can be used everywhere and when you do you are in good company. Stephen Fry uses Audioboo as does the BBC.
It is not necessary to set up an account with Audioboo to record your students’ voices. However if you do all of your “boos,” as they are known, will be collated into one place and on the Audioboo site you can create your own channel. If you use the same account on your iOS devices the students can simply record and upload in a matter of two or three clicks, the technology and the app become transparent, which is what makes for excellent blended elearning in a class. I was using Audioboo in a class last week and the students were working on a range of devices with ease.
With Audioboo you can use it in the classroom in so many ways that they are almost too numerous to mention. However I have used it as a running reading record for students and also as a resource for students to listen to their own reading and to set their own goals. With only three minutes of recording time on the free account available to you, the students have to learn not to waffle or to pause their recordings. It is a great tool to use to capture student thoughts, ideas and concepts and use these recordings to scaffold later work.
In short this app is what good elearning tools should be, greater than the sum of its parts, simple to use, transparent. Oh and its free!
This new app is designed to be the next big thing. It’s aim is to make it bigger than Twitter. Despite the hype that surrounds it, the app actually has some great potential for the classroom. Its name is Tweetvox and as it name implies, it enables a user to send audio clips via social networks.
Obviously a school will have to enable access to Twitter, Four Square or Facebook for the app to fly. This will mean that schools will have to think through all of the potential issues associated with Twitter accounts in classrooms, but for those that have already thought this through, this app has potential, especially when combined with the new timeline feature in Facebook. I can see lots of Drama potential in using a tool like Tweetvox in conjunction with Facebook for example. I can also see how debates and other oral language skills can be recorded, disected and examined as a series of tweets and Facebook updates.
Perhaps best of all, for those using Twitter to communicate with other classes, for collaboration around the world. Tweetvox offers the potential to escape the 140 character limit and open up a recordable, archiveable collaborative dialogue for students and school administration alike.
Draw Something is the latest craze in the world of iOS and Android apps. If you have not heard about it the basic premise is that you are given three words to choose from, you then have to draw the word and share your drawing with your friends, who then have to guess the word associated with your drawing. To help, you are given a selection of scrambled letter tiles which include all the letters needed for the word you are trying to decypher from the image plus some others. A screen looks like the following:
Draw Something Screen Shot
The purpose of the game is to earn coins which will enable you to unlock more colours to make your drawings more varied. However this is not the point for education. I think that this game, could be used as fantastic literacy warm up activity for students of any age. Students could all be able to set challenges for each other, so in one session a student could pick up a challenge from one student, guess it and then set another challenge for someone else. All of which would take less than 5 minutes. Using this game in class is a good example of using tablet devices to do more than busy work. By setting word challenges that have to be solved as an image, children are forced to think in terms of homonyms, to think of visual puns and the recipient of the challenge has to do this too and also has the added chalenge of using the letters to decypher anangrams. All of which are higher order thinking skills and make children focus on the meanings of words, great for vocabulary building and fun to boot.
As you earn more coins you can also unlock more words which get progressively harder and each challenge is graded as a one, two or three coin challenge. I have been playing this game with four others for a couple of weeks now and in all of that time I have only found one word which may cause some slight concern for a teacher and hilarity for the students. This app is a good example of how a tablet, or iOS device can be integrated into an existing class programme and have identified learning outcomes related to the curriculum and at the same time engage students in a task they will find engaging and authentic.
I have been working with Tanya at St Joseph’s today. Most of the day has been focused around integration of iPads into the curriculum. Consuming content is easy on an iPad, and there are a plethora of paid and free apps that enable you to do just that, passively consume content or never get past enrichment exercises. The trick with the closed eco system of the iPad is to find quick and easy ways for students to create content that demonstrates their understanding and to post this work to a public space rapidly. In all of my research with apps for the iPad this is my focus, can students create content easily and how easy is it then for them to share that learning on a wiki, blog, LMS or website of their choice.
Today I worked with some of Tanya’s class to show them the ShowMe app, a free screen capture and annotation app that enables students to write and speak their thoughts and ideas on screen. We captured a block of text from a book in the library and then had them identify the text features on the screen. The app is easy to use and within seconds the students were proficient at the tool and were demonstrating their learning. Now Tanya has a record of what each student knows and this work has now been embedded into their wiki page. The ShowMe site is a whole community of teachers and you can follow the videos of others, so if you want to scaffold students through concepts that they find tricky there are lots of videos up there for you to choose from and to passively consume. However it is better to be the ones creating the content in my opinion and sharing it with the wider ShowMe community. Below is a video I took of the students at work.
I have just completed a project to integrate 2D animation into the curriculum. I have organised the resource by curriculum area and in year bands in order that teachers can see the kinds of activities they could contmeplate undertaking with their students, in particular curriculum areas. The resource caters for students from Year 1 through to Year 10. In this first iteraction of the document I have just concentrated on Literacy, Numeracy, Science, Social Studies and Te Reo. I have no doubt that I will be adding more ideas to more strands of each curriculum area and to other curriculum areas over the coming weeks!
The screen shot above shows how a teacher of years 7 and 8 might want to use animation in a science lesson. In the resource I have sometimes given a simple over view of the ideas for activities (as above) and then in other cases more complex and detailed ideas for activities. Each idea has been graded by level and curriculum strand as well. In addition I have listed the kinds of tools that would deliver the outcomes stated in the activites as well as stating where the students should save their work to and how a teacher might then re-use the resource created by the students for futher learning. Finally I have indicated where each activity might have other curriculum area integration potential.
Now that I have done this document I will be turning my attention to other elearning activities such as integrating digital cameras, video camears, capturing student voice etc and how these can be integrated into each curriculum area and year level. Watch this space.
I have spent the summer creating the first tranche of resources for an integrated elearing planner for teachers. The resource is web based and is designed to be stored on a school’s intranet or LMS. It is designed to be adapted to the individual needs of a school and is not an off the shelf resource. We will adapt it to mee the specific needs of any school.
As part of my facilitation work I see that the biggest stumbling block for those teachers who are not those at the leading edge of elearning is making the conceptual/pedagocial leap into elearning. For this strata of the teaching profession they have adopted the strategy of regarding ICT/elearning as an extra, almost a treat for the students in their classrooms. What is more, when the going gets tough, ICT activities can be withtdrawn, shelved, put on ice etc. In addition the classroom strategies adopted by these teachers ensures that the type of ICT work that they have the students do is almost always enrichment type activities.
The resource I have created is designed to scaffold these teachers in thier journey towards elearning integration in their classroom. The image above is a screen shot from just one of the pages. I have taken an existing units of work and have created age appropriate, curriculum specific learning activities that include suggested elearning tools that teachers could use (Arrow A). In the next column (Arrow B) is a list of suggested elearning tools that teachers might like to consider using, each has their merits and the idea is that a teacher will select a tool to achieve the learning goals, based on their own comfort levels. In the third column (Arrow C) there are links to interactive tutorials that I have created, that teachers can use to learn how to use the tools suggested in the second column. I have always said to teachers that it is not important whether they can use the tools I suggest that they might like to use in class. What is important is that they know what the learning potential these tools can facilitate and plan accordingly. So equally this column and the interactive tutorials they point to, could be shared with students so that they learn how to use the tools. The final column links to other documents to demonstrate the integration potential of the activities highlighted. At the bottom of each learning activity I have also coded the activities as being E, P, C or PS for Enrichment, Publishing, Collaboration or Problem Solving activities. The purpose here is for teachers to be able to monitor what kind of activities predominate in their class and to set goals to make the elearning a richer experience in their classes as a result of their audits.
Over time I will add another column to this resource, one which links to videos of best practice; best practice with specific tools being used in classrooms by teachers. I have long been a champion of schools retaining their Intellectual Property and think capturing teacher best practice is a good way to ensure that this happens. The added benefit of doing this, when combined with the resource that I have created is that not only is IP actively farmed, schools create an induction pack for new staff that can be used by individual schools to project a philosphy of how they do elearning.
Perhaps the best beneift to schools is that over time they are creating their own training resource, specific to their school. It will be a truly JIT (Just in Time) training resource for new and existing staff.
I am happy to talk with you to discuss your individual requirements for this resource to work in your school.
The second edition of theEdudemic Magazine has been published this weekend. To read the magazine you will have to download the app and then either subscribe to the magazine for 6 months or purchase individual articles.
I am delighted to announce that the article I submitted a couple of weeks ago is the subject of the front cover. What is more I have been asked to submit another article for the March edition, although at the moment I have no idea what the focus for this next article is to cover. This month’s issue of the magazine has the following articles:
What Apple’s Education Initiative Really Means for You - Terry Heick
Technology: Changing the Expectations for Individuals with Disabilities - Dr Robin Parker
How Technology has Education on the Cusp of Revolution - David Kinane
iPads and Classrooms: Towards Meaningful iPad Integration - Francisco Nieto Salazar
Technology Versus the Student - Jesse Langley
New Web Tool Amps Up Google Docs and Turns Collaboration up to 11 - Erin Klein
Why All Ed Reform Fails - Terry Heick
All in all a good read. And just to whet your appetites, here is a snippet from my article, but to read the full transcript you will have to download the February issue.
The evolving app based world we are currently entering into is enabling educators to cheaply create bespoke suites of tools that meet the personalised needs of their students.What is more, many of the apps that appear on their mlearning devices have a web based counterpart. Often the app is free as is the web based service.The benefit to learning is that students have multiple modes of access to the tools that enable them to demonstrate their learning, in this case to capture and publish their voice.The opportunities for sharing learning are becoming ubiquitous, location and time independent.School is always on, open and accessible as a result.
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