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.
Again like last week this app is not new. In fact I have been using the web based version of Fotobabble for a number of years. But as I said in my recent article for Edudemic Magazine, this app is the kind of classroom resource that will make the technology disappear and the learning happen.
In a nutshell, Fotobbble for those of you who have not used it allows you to take a photo on your iOS device, you can then edit it, even add annotations and then you can add your voice. Then with a simple click the file, providing you have set up an account on the website is uploaded to fotobabble. Once there the file can then be embedded into the location of your choice, wiki, blog, LMS website etc. This has so many classroom based connotations that it is a wonder that it is not more universally used in class. I was working in a Year 1 and a year 3 class last week, I introduced Fotobabble to them for the first time and you can see how easily they took to the app in this video:
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 spent a good deal of the summer holidays in the South Island. It seems from the people that I have spoken to on my return, that it was a good thing that I did! The weather up here in Auckland was less than summery and was very wet. In the South Island we baked, it was great.
I have created a time lapse video from the trip and you can see it below. Why share a ‘holiday’ video on an education blog? There are free apps for the iPad that enable time lapse projects to happen in class. A web cam and Sam Animation will turn any computer into a time lapse camera. The point being that from recording how the earth rotates to watching flowers bloom, takes time. Time lapse allows students to see what might be an abstract concept happen because this slow process can be sped up through time lapse. Sure there are plenty of time lapse videos for them to look at on the Internet, however if they were to create them for themselves, they would have a greater understanding of the time frames involved. The advent of digital cameras, web cams, free apps and software now make this once technical skill a simple reality in the classroom.
On a different note, each scene in the following video represents an hour of time, where I could do nothing but relax, let the camera do its stuff and marvel at the beauty around me.
Earlier in the week I Tweeted an article from Wired Magazine, it was their cover article which procalimed that the WWW is in terminal decline. Subsequently the article has also been given a reality check by technologizer’s article which reminds us that life is not quite so black and white and that the screaming banner headlines are just that.
However the app based reality envisioned by the Wired article got me thinking. Talk of the digital divide has subsided somewhat over the last couple of years, the proliferation of cheaper tools to access the internet has seen to that. Palfrey and Gasser in their book Born Digital argue that the digital divide was never about equipment, but about skills. The skills required to effectively work with the exponential explosion of information that the Internet gives us access to and the ablility to make sense of that whilst working collaboratively with our physical and virtual peers. The key here is that we all have equal access to the information and resources on offer on the Internet. The Internet has become the great leveller and videos like Karl Fisch’s Did You Know, highlight the potential issues confronting all of us competing on a globally leveled environment.
So what of the app based reality envisioned or predicted by the Wired Magazine article? This potentially puts access to and control of content back in the hands of the providers and producers. To date making money out of the Internet has been a difficult thing to master. Wired magazine itself has just made an iPad app for their magazine and Rupert Murdoch is trying to charge for his news content. How long will it be before the only way to read Wired online is through an app - subscription payment model? Apps are marketed as code that works, a classic case of “it does what it says on the tin.” My fear is that if the app based predicitons become reality, then education and e-learning will be the poorer for it. It will bring back the user pays bad old days, which creates divides, creates information walled gardens, which education will be on the outside of, unless they pay. The beauty of the open, unfettered net is that creative teachers can design and implement packages, experiences and stimuli catered to the needs of their children. An app based internet reality will either bypass education completely as the returns are not high enough for developers to spend any meaningful time in that sphere or the apps themselves will be created for mass market appeal and not terribly educationally relevant. The solution? Educators should jump on the app band waggon and start to develop apps for schools, either that or the net should remain open to all.
I am working in two different schools tomorrow. In the morning I am working with teachers on an induction programme I have developed to get new staff up to speed with the systems and technologies specific to that school. The aim of the programme is to ensure that the individual teachers get up to speed as fast as they can, to ensure that students do not experience a time and service delivery lag as one teacher swaps out of a class and a new one walks in.
In the afternoon I start working with a new client. We will be working on their e-learning initiatives for the rest of the year and specifically focusing on 2011. We will be starting the ball rolling by getting the e-learning policies and proceedures in place. Getting the foundation right is critical for e-learning success and again I have developed a range of tools to guide senior management through this process.
However, our afternoon is likely to be hugely overshadowed by the new iPad that the school has just purchased via the US. The school and I are very keen to see how we can exploit this tool for the education market and we believe that we are the first school in NZ to implement this tool. I have already been approached by an iPhone developer who is keen to also develop apps that can be distributed via the app store education specific software tailored for the iPad. Tomorrow should be fun.
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