Many classrooms these days are looking to make the technology in their classrooms seamless, a standard part of what they do. This is great. Our students live in an environment where they use technology outside school all the time and to keep it out of their hands at school would be doing them a huge disservice. However, it’s important to remember what it means to have technology be seamless, and truly a standard part of what we do.

Pencils are used seamlessly in schools. They are available to students when they want them. The students know how to use them safely. And the adults don’t take them away (unless, of course, the students are using the pencils in an unsafe manner). And of course, no matter how poorly a student may have behaved in one subject, it would be unheard of to then take away his/her pencil for another subject.

But in too many classrooms where we are trying to integrate technology, our mindset isn’t quite where it needs to be. If we truly believe that we want to seamlessly integrate technology, then we can never use it as a behavioral carrot. If the plans are to use iPads (or any other piece of technology) in math, then no matter how poor student decisions were earlier in the day the iPads have to come out in math.

We can no longer say, “Well, you didn’t listen well in that last lesson, so we’re not going to use [insert shiny technology] this afternoon.” Would we ever catch ourselves saying “Well, you didn’t listen well in that last lesson, so we’re not going to use pencils this afternoon”? Or lined paper? Or pattern blocks? No, that would be absurd.

Technology cannot be a carrot. It can’t be a behavioral bribe. If we truly believe technology is a core part of what we do, then we can’t take it away (unless students are using it inappropriately).

Last weekend I had the pleasure attending Playdate Boston, the latest iteration of educators redefining professional development to make it more useful for thm. The premise of a Playdate is that in most professional development sessions you hear about all these new fantastic tools, but don’t get the time to actually play with them and figure out how they will (or won’t) fit into you professional life. Playdate was a time to bring educators together to do just that.

Each playdate session had (loosely) four parts:

1. A quick intro the the topic of the session.
2. A quick discussion about what a teacher could do with the tool. How to use it with kids, roadblocks, etc.
3. Time to play!
4. A quick debrief.

The day ended with a Slam where participants shared what they’d learned, allowing us to hear about the sessions we didn’t attend. Collaborative notes from the Slam are here.

A few days out, this is what has stuck in my mind (in no particular order):

• Playdates are fun. Educators need more of these.
• Explain Everything. I need to spend more time with this app – and by that I mean my students need to spend more time with it. The last couple updates have made the app explode. Embedded browsers, that are live during recording blew me away. It really is such a versatile tool for allowing students to show their learning.
• Bump is a much better way for my students to get content from one iPad to another. In the past we’ve used a shared classroom Dropbox account. Bump will do this more easily.
• Workflow idea. Every Evernote account has a dedicated email address so you can email directly into the account (or to a specific notebook!). Put that email address in the contacts of student iPads so they can email their work directly to a teacher’s Evernote account.
• iMovie (for the iPad). I (and my students) also need to spend more time with this app. It’s one-stop shopping for movies (shooting, selecting clips, editing, publishing, sharing). Learned about one downside of the app allowing you to not save the unwanted clips – no material for a bloopers reel.
• Discovery Education has clips in its library that are okay to reuse in student projects.
• Symbaloo. This is cool, a visual way of curating links. I use a “Student Links” page on my classroom website, but I like the visual tile look of Symbaloo.
• Image Dictionary is a Chrome extension that allows users to look up a word, but instead of getting a dictionary definition (which is often not terribly useful for a struggling reader) it produces a picture. Great for younger readers.

And to cap off the day, it was the opening night of Boston Roller Derby!

top photo credit: Express Monorail via photopin cc

I love using free iPad apps in my classroom. Who doesn’t? But with free apps comes ads – ads that neither my students nor I have any control over. Being a digital citizen means knowing how to deal with it, but how do you explain it to 8-year-olds? And their parents?

I found this worked well. Below is the email I sent out to parents explaining what I did with my 3rd graders:

The class had a chat today about Digital Citizenship and where iPad apps come from.

I started explaining that apps are programmed by real people. Making apps is their job, and they need to get paid. And they do, usually through one of three ways.

1. Some apps cost money. Those apps work really well and don’t have any ads (commercials). The money we pay to purchase the app goes to the developers. These include the Explain Everything and Drawing Pad apps we use in the classroom.
2. Some apps are free but have limited features. Angry Birds is a great example of this. You can get the free version, but it only has a few levels. The idea is if you like the game you’ll purchase the full, paid, version. The developer gets money when we buy the full version.
3. Other apps are free but come with advertisements. Rather than us paying for the app, another company pays the developer for screen space, forcing us to see their ads. I compared it to TV. Sometimes TV is free (network broadcast), but advertising pays for it. It’s the same with some free apps.

We use all three kinds of apps, though we spent most of our time talking about the last kind. I explained the ads are like commercials in that we don’t have to watch them. When commercials come on when we’re watching TV we can mute them, or talk to someone, or even leave the room. We are in control.

The same is true with app ads. We can ignore them. The catch is, as end users, we don’t get to control what the ads are. So far we’ve seen ads for games, juice, and… local singles.

Fortunately, that last one is only text, no images. Also fortunately, developers know that users rate and comment on apps, and if an app designed for kids has ads that are truly inappropriate, they will hear about it in the comments of the app store (and developers can’t delete those comments).

I reiterated that we can ignore the ads and that if kids ever come across something they have questions about or feel uncomfortable about that they should find an adult.

Exciting and innovative things happen when we use technology to expand the walls of the school and where learning can occur. We can also bump into things we weren’t looking for. We have good internet filters in Arlington, though no filter is 100% perfect for all grades all the time. So, part of being a good Digital Citizen means having an internal filter, understanding how it all works, and knowing how to behave in a safe way. And knowing that if you find something that doesn’t sit right that students are in a building full of caring adults who are more than willing to help.

Parent response was very positive, ranging from “Thanks, glad you’re on top of this!” to “It is good to know that you are worrying about these things and that our 3rd graders are not being exposed to bad stuff in the schools.”

Teaching is messy. And when you add the iPad, or any other hyper-connected tool, it can get really messy. The key is it get out ahead of it, and be honest (with kids and parents). As educators we are doing new and innovative things every day. Things aren’t always going to go as planned. Just make sure to roll with it, and make sure everyone knows what’s going on.

photo credit: AMagill, Personal Income via photopin cc

Tales from a third grade, 1:1 iPad pilot.

The iPad is a tool. A versatile one, for sure, but it’s just a tool. It’s not a magic bullet. And it’s not a teacher. But when when is it the right tool?

When looking at where to incorporate iPads into my class I’ve found myself asking three questions:

1. Can the iPad make something easier?
2. Can the iPad make something more engaging/fun?
3. Can the iPad make something that was prohibitively difficult now doable?

Can the iPad make something easier?

Movies. They can be a great way for students to creatively show what they have learned. But the process used to be cumbersome, often prohibitively so, looking something look like this:

1. Shoot lots of video with a digital camera (some of the clips were good; others were trash; they all ended up on the camera).
2. Find the cable to get all the clips (good and trash) off the camera.
3. Move the clips to a place on the network where the students can get to them (hopefully there’s enough space; those movie files get pretty big).
4. Give the students time to go through the clips to find the good ones.
5. Use some sort of video editing program to put it all together.
6. Zip it into a single movie file.

This could be a forbidding process on the best of days. iMovie ($4.99) makes the process simple. It allows for users to shoot video, select quality clips, and edit/export the final product all from the same device. This is a game-changer in the world of student videos.

In college I took a media literacy course where we experimented with in-camera editing, a rudimentary way of splicing your movie together within the video camera itself (back when cameras shot on real video tapes). At best, it was an iffy process. iMovie on the iPad brings an ease to the movie-making process that has never been there before.

Can the iPad make something more engaging/fun?

With third grade comes the charge of getting my students to memorize their multiplication facts. Many are not intrinsically thrilled about this and try as I may we are still looking at plain-old memorization. It wasn’t fun when I had to do it (though I am very glad I did), and in an age of instant gratification it certainly isn’t any more fun now. But the iPad allows us to easily gamify the process. Apps like Speed Math (free) and Ace Multiply (free; my kids really like this one) make the process fun. Often when my students finish early in math they’ll ask, “Can I play Ace Multiply?” Yes, they ask if they can practice their math facts; this has never happened before. “Of course you can!”

Can the iPad make something that was prohibitively difficult now doable?

I’m always on the lookout for new and better ways for my students to demonstrate their learning. Explain Everything ($2.99) has opened some new doors for this. In short, the app allows students to create and modify visual diagrams while recording their voice over the diagrams. The app then exports a movie file.

I suppose I could have done this in the past. I could have sat down for a one-on-one with each student and had them explain what they had learned, talking as they drew pictures. It would have taken an enormous amount of time, and certainly would not have been a good use of time for the other 23 students in the class. With the help of Dropbox (free), my students can show and tell me what they know and I can view it when it doesn’t eat into the precious hours of the student day.

The iPad is a tool, and like all tools if you select the wrong one for the job you won’t be happy. The iPad is no different. Sometimes it’s the right tool; sometimes it isn’t. When it’s the right tool, it can change a classroom.

photo credit: Meanest Indian via photopin cc