Category Archives: #ipaded

Digital Research is Different, and That’s Okay

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Tales from a 1:1 iPad pilot.

After an afternoon of researching on the iPads, a veteran educator in the room commented to me that she worried the kids weren’t interacting with physical books. Getting ready for a digital product, and taking digital notes, wasn’t the same as if they had to plan out something like a physical poster.

booksI wanted to defend the iPads, but I couldn’t help but acknowledge some truth in what she was saying. Though it wasn’t that they weren’t interacting with the content, it was just a different interaction. iPads are “mistake tolerant” (Beth Holland mentioned this a lot at the EdTechTeacher iPad Summit), so interacting with them is different.

Designing content for a paper product meant lots of planning and a single shot at the finished product. If it doesn’t go the way you want it to, that might necessitate starting over (or living with a product you weren’t 100% happy with). The mistake tolerance of the iPad (and other digital media) makes for a different interaction. You can jump in haphazardly and make changes as you go.

Are these two approaches different? Absolutely! Is one better than the other? I don’t know. iPads are a different kind of tool, and thus allow for different approaches. If we are going to leverage the full power of them with students we need to recognize that. With mistake tolerant devices our planning phases look very different. I’m not advocating for abolishing planning, but with a different tool the approach needs to be different too.

photo credit: Mr. T in DC via photopin cc

 

Managing iPads in the Classroom

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I was fortunate enough to get to run a 1:1 iPad pilot in my self-contained third grade classroom this year. This is the first in a series of posts sharing what I have done and learned in hopes that other educators implementing 1:1 programs won’t have to reinvent the wheel. Feel free to take and/or modify any resources here.

When I begin the year, I don’t have classroom rules. It’s a practice I picked up with my Responsive Classroom training. The students come up with Hopes and Dreams for the year and over the course of the first few days we build rules that will support those hopes and dreams, and help us achieve them.

When the iPads arrived, I took a similar approach. The class talked about the fact that they were tools for learning and that they were fragile. The front is a sheet of glass. It will break. And if you drop a sheet of glass onto a hard tile floor, the glass is going to loose that battle every time. We also agreed that carrying the iPads with two hands was a good idea.

Te next few lessons were about navigating the iPad. I took the iPad Orientation Checklist that Dan Callahan at Pine Glen Elemenary (Burlington, MA) used, and modified it a little. Thanks Dan. This is my version. We explored a few core apps that I figured we’d get a lot of mileage out of. When I saw behavior/handling I didn’t feel comfortable with, I would stop the class and we’d talk about it for a couple minutes.

It was a few days into the process before we formally started talking rules.

I started with Suzy Brooks’ ipad rules (thanks Suzy). I told the class this was a set of rules from another third grade class in Massachusetts. I wanted to look at those rules, see if we wanted to keep or modify them, and see if there were any we wanted to add.

The conversation was surprising mature. The kids really seemed to understand the importance of having fair rules to keep the iPads safe. We settled on these rules.

  • Two hands on the iPad at all times.
  • Make sure the iPad is fully on a table at all times. (No corners hanging off the edge of a desk/table)
  • Do not delete anyone else’s work or apps. (We have some shared cloud-based accounts)
  • If you aren’t sure, ask someone.
  • Only visit apps or websites with permission.
  • Only one person pilots the iPad at a time.
  • Only adults plug and unplug the iPads.
  • Let an adult know when your battery gets below 25% so the iPad can be recharged.
  • No mirroring without permission. (We have a ceiling mounted Apple TV in the room)
  • No iPad passwords.
  • iPads are school tools, not toys.

A few months in the kids are doing well. They follow the rules pretty well (they are 8-years-old after all). I trust the students enough to use the iPads when I’m out and guest teacher is in. The iPad is a school tool, and it comes out every day. It’s become an essential part of what we do. (I don’t use it in every lesson – they’re one of many tools we use in the classroom, but we do use them every day).

When Students Say, “I Just Know”

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For as long as I can remember, my dad has been a math teacher: elementary school, middle school, high school, and for the past 22 years as an independent consultant. As such I have fond memories of sitting in Pizza Hut booths as a kid being posed math questions as we waited for our dinner. As I solved them I was guaranteed to have the follow-up question, “how do you know?” I came to expect it.

At the time, the questions bugged me. “I just do” I would often respond. If I got the question right, why did it matter? Years later as I went through my teacher prep program and began teaching I realized the value of the question and now subject my students to the same question.

flow1Coming back from the holidays on a long bus ride I found myself killing time on my iPad with Flow (an iOS app). It’s a game (albeit one based on spacial puzzles) I’ve played before and I’ve developed strategies. The idea is to connect the dots, without having any of your lines cross. At times I let my students use the app in school and it’s always interesting to see who takes off with it and who struggles (that is to say, who has a strong spacial sense and who struggles in that area).

As I played I got to thinking, if someone asked me about one of the puzzles, “how do you know?” or “can you explain your thinking?” how would I respond?

So I went with the Explain Everything tactic. If I could layer speech (a verbal explanation) over what I was doing in the game, in real time, could I explain what I was doing? That seemed reasonable.

flow2My initial strategy of filing in the outside squares was easy to explain, but then I just found myself seeing the board three or four moves ahead of where I was. Half of the flows would be complete, and I would instantly see the rest. The metacognition we ask our students to do wasn’t working because I wasn’t actually thinking. My eyes saw the board as a whole and my fingers quickly traced around the iPad screen. I was sitting back watching my brain bypass rational thought. It just knew.

flow3So if I, an educator with strong spacial skills, can’t explain my spacial thinking is it fair to require all my students be able to explain all their thinking all the time? (Yea, that question made me a little uncomfortable too, which may or may not be a bad thing.)

Ok, I’m not saying we should stop asking kids to explain their thinking. And I’m not going to stop asking my kids to explain theirs. It’s a good question and one we should be asking. But everybody’s brain is different. We’re all wired in different ways. We all remember Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. Is it possible that “I just know” really is what’s going on in a kid’s brain? Just because we have to think about it (and can be metacognative because we actually are thinking) is it inconceivable that the brain of a student might be wired so differently that they just see what comes next? That they truly don’t have to think about it? That they really just know?

I think it is possible. And I think it happens enough that we need to be aware of it. There are a lot of elementary teachers out there who are especially strong in the linguistic intelligence. If we’re going to help all our students be successful, we need to be open to the idea that we will have students who are stronger in some intelligences than we are, even in elementary school. It’s a wiring thing.

So, the next time a student tells you they just know, take a moment. Maybe they do. Maybe their brain is wired very differently than yours. Maybe it’s the truth: maybe they do just know.