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.

This week has seen a flurry of videoing activity from me as I tour round all of the schools that I have been working with in 2010. At the start of the year I recorded the aspirations of each of these teachers for the year ahead and now they are reflecting on that year. I am asking them all the same questions, I give them no time to prepare and what I hope you see is the impact that the integration of some simple tools and a pedagogical sea change on behalf of the teacher and the effect is dramatic. Here is Maureen from Pukekohe Valley School reflecting on her pedagogical change, classroom management and student attainment.

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With the second milestone written, submitted and accepted and the year two variation being considered by the MoE, another teacher from Pukekohe Cluster reflects on one year of e-learning.

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In an earlier post I quoted the “Aha!” moment of one of the teachers that I work with.  She has put the computers at the point of learning and in her case this means on the desks where the student sit in her class.  This is a direct response to the kind argument that David Jakes makes in his slide show which I featured in a June post.  The feed back from Maureen is that this simple act of moving the computers from the isolation point of the wall at the back of the room to where the students sit has had an immediate and dramatic effect upon the students’ learning and engagement with the tasks set.  The images below demonstrate how this is working in Maureen’s class.  Maureen has now requested from me the e-learning planning templates that I have developed in order that she can better plan to integrate a wider spectrum of  meaningful e-learning interventions into her term 4 planning.  I for one can not wait to get back to her class to see how her students are flourishing under their new layout.

This is why I love what I do. The following quote is a direct copy of an e-mail sent to me today from a teacher whom I worked with yesterday.

After talking to you yesterday, this morning I have changed my desk configuration of each group of 4 students to have access to a computer at the end of their desks, AMAZING, students immediately started working collaboratively, sharing ideas and recording their ideas ( see our wiki- I wonder questions about the Christchurch earthquake). We then put this immediately onto wiki.
My management of the class has immediately changed, I know longer need timetables of when they will get their turn- as they manage that as a group, I am also thinking of more ways to use the computers in a collaborative way.
Thanks for the discussion always is refreshing and stimulating.

I describe myself as a change agent, I put ideas in front of talented and creative teachers.  I make the case for change, they interpret those ideas and act upon them. The subsequent actions of the teachers then stimulates children.  They start to engage at a different level, they think deeper, they find the work authentic and relevant.

In this particular case all a teacher has done is move the furniture, just like David Jakes illustrates in his presentation that I featured in an earlier post, suggests. You can see the results of this change on the class wiki and I am sure there will be more evidence as the days and weeks unfold. http://2010pvsrm04.wikispaces.com/Topic

I have already shared how Mel at Westmere has taken my suggested idea of class experts and has created her own experts wall.  She even went to the trouble of creating and sharing a template for others to use.  I have been promoting the great progress and innovation that Mel has been achieving at Westmere and it is obviously paying dividends. I was in Buckland School yesterday working with their lead teachers from the cluster and they took me to one of the rooms that is powering ahead with e-learning.  To my surprise and delight, there was Mel’s experts wall template and my experts idea thriving on a class wall that neither of us have had input into.  Proving that great ideas need spreading.  The slide show above shows the images from Buckland.