I recently wrote an article jointly with the Principal of Berkhamsted School, Mark Steed, on ICT as a catalyst for change in pedagogy. It was published in the ISC Bulletin, 29, June 2012, pp.30-34.

 

‘Each change in technology in schools makes us revisit and re-evaluate how and why we do what we do in the classroom. New technologies no longer just automate what we did in the past but they open up new possibilities. Mobile Devices, Cloud-based documents, iTextbooks and a whole new generation of educational applications have placed learning much more firmly in the control of the student, giving them scope to work and collaborate with whom they want, whenever they want. These developments are not going to do away with the need for teachers, but they are going to call for a new pedagogy. In this article, Mark Steed and Laura Knight outline how new technologies are changing how young people learn and suggest some ways in which teachers can support them in their learning.’

Co-author: Mark Steed, Principal, Berkhamsted School

@independenthead

I have exciting news.

My classroom at school is now kitted out with an Apple TV and an Airport Express (Father Christmas did eventually deliver!) so I can wirelessly mirror my iPad onto my board at the front of the room. This has really got me thinking about the joy of untethering from my IWB, but also threw up some questions about my workaday apps for getting stuff on the board for my students.

I was looking at my collection of drawing apps which I could use as a whiteboard space for outlining concepts and jotting ad hoc material. I have quite a few and tested them out as pseudo-whiteboards / slates.  I don’t tend to do lots of Keynote style presentations and like to have a more freeform set of tools. I came to a free app from Evernote which I hadn’t previously used much, called Skitch.

Skitch allows you to really instantly save your creations to Evernote: a perfect fit with my workflow. I already do all my lesson planning in Evernote and sync my notebooks across my various machines and mobile devices. I can then quickly and easily find and share the notes I make in class with colleagues or kids who are absent and need to catch up.

What’s more, Skitch+Evernote makes the perfect assessment tool. I can annotate screengrabs, photographs student work or even maps; display them on the board and instantly sync and share them via Evernote. One student whose homework is being monitored didn’t complete his handwritten assignment on Friday so I quickly snapped it on my iPad, annotated what needed improvement and emailed it within seconds to his pastoral leader. I also found it really handy to input a photo of a paper resource and have students annotate it on my iPad from anywhere in the room.

I’ve only been using this in my lessons for a day and already so many great ideas are surfacing: I am sure that Skitch will easily earn its place amongst my favourite classroom apps.  I can certainly see it becoming the engine room of a student eportfolio. I love it when a workflow comes together!

This is the video I created at the Apple Teacher Institute 2012 this week in Cheltenham. I made it for my team as a strategic tool to open our professional development session at the beginning of term. I was keen to produce something with a genuine purpose (it was going to take a day to make, after all!) and that would bring together the skills I’d learned at ATI. I also wanted to see what the experience of a relatively complex workflow using multiple apps and creative elements would be like.

In terms of content, my aim was develop a trigger for strategic discussion about lesson planning and resourcing in my team which will help us move beyond the ‘single app for a single purpose’ approach that has been a little limiting so far in our iPad deployment. I plan to model a workflow for them which will help demonstrate how moving content through a pathway of multiple apps can generate far more impressive outcomes that single apps can.

I created all the elements for the video and edited them on my iPad – no other devices were needed apart from a tripod with an iPad mount for the interviews with the Apple Distinguished Educators.

My workflow for creating the video was as follows:

• Brainstorm all the key elements in the mindmapping app Popplet to plan the order of the movie.
• Record video elements of interviews with ADEs using the standard Camera App. (I considered using a green screen app but I had struggled with convincing quality so I chickened out!)
• Build presentation slides with text and graphics in Keynote.
• Import Keynote slides and record voiceover in Explain Everything, then export video to Camera Roll.
• Screenshot remaining Keynote slides in presentation mode and save to Camera Roll.
• Save web-harvested images and import and crop in Puppet Pals (I have the Directors’ Pass which allows the import of your own pictures)
• Record Puppet Pals sequence and export to Camera Roll.
• Import all video elements into iMovie and edit together. Add soundtrack, transitions and titles.
• Upload finished project to Vimeo direct from iMovie.

The whole thing took a leisurely 7 hours as I spent a long time at the beginning of the day on my Popplet planning and establishing exactly what the content would be. I’ll publish further posts about the key learning from the course shortly!

Do let me know if you find this video useful.

I made my first ever Infographic today. I used the online tool Piktochart.com and was very impressed! Here it is:

I wish I could travel back in time to the era when children in school stopped writing on slates and started writing on paper and in exercise books. It must have been the most tremendous shift: students could accumulate a bank of their own written work and it no longer had to be carried entirely in their memories. Rote learning and the ability to recall facts was the backbone of a traditional education.  Can you imagine being a fly on the wall in the staff room of the day, when Masters would bemoan the flagrant waste of valuable paper, the new plague of inkstains and the erosion of standards?

A century or so on and our attitude to memory is changing. In their future lives, today’s students will have a different attitude to memory and I’m guessing they will rarely have to remember lists of facts or dates, recite quotations off by heart or recall the appropriate formula to use for a calculation. Instead of a body of facts taking top intellectual priority, perhaps a skillset to include the following will be more sought after:

• resourcefulness: knowing where to look for information
• mastery of the specialist vocabulary required to enter the appropriate search terms: sometimes the hardest thing is asking the internet the right question
• discernment to appreciate the quality of the information at hand
• perspective to enable the compilation of different elements from varied sources in a sensible manner
• understanding to manipulate that finished picture into something meaningful and coherent that answers the question asked and moves the learner on to the next thing.

So back to the staff room, where sceptical grumbles roll on in this century like they did in the last about the demise of traditional educational standards. Those standards simply are no longer the best measure for excellence in today’s society. In fact, they might never have been: nostalgia is a wonky yardstick with which to measure the present. I suspect a proportion of educationalists have always clung to the past and always will, whilst others throw themselves headlong into change. We are all human.

Perhaps it is worth reminding those sceptical colleagues that technological shift isn’t new. It has been changing the way learning happens for over a hundred years across the developed world. The chalkboard, the pencil, mass-produced paper, the OHP, slide projectors… you can map quite a history of development before computers even arrive.  (Read more about changing classroom technologies here) The pace of change continues to move onwards and more and more teachers and educational leaders are taking steps to ensure their students are not left behind. A few grumbles in the staff room are hardly going to hold back the tide!

Joe Moretti passed on this list of iPad apps for a variety of classroom purposes from edtechteacher.org, which I think is superb.

The categories are:

• Reader
• Creator
• Student Response System
• Classroom Manager
• Study Tool
• Organizer
• Differentiator

Click here to take a look at the list!

On my iPad I have developed a folder of tools I use in the classroom I have called ‘accelerators’. They don’t necessarily add huge value when used alone, but as part of a workflow they have quickly become firm favourites. There are literally hundreds of apps that perform functions like these so finding something that does what it says on the tin without too much fuss is the name of the game.

Here’s my pick of the best accelerators for iPads in classrooms:

My favourite:

Easy QR (free)

 Pros: This app does everything you would want a QR code reader and generator to do. The interface is clean and intuitive and the whole thing works beautifully. QR codes are the simplest and quickest way to get everyone in a class onto a web page, or provide low interference stretch / support materials. I don’t know how we managed before we used them.

Cons: The app doesn’t automatically open at the QR code reader. That literally is my only niggle.

 The best of the rest:

Bamboo paper (free)

 Pros: Super handy for rough notes, use as a digital mini-whiteboard, quick answers to a listening activity etc. etc.

 Cons: App startup is a little slow to get to the first blank page and the buttons are teeny and not altogether intuitive.

Make Dice Lite (free)

Pros: Make up to six of your own personalised dice and use the preloaded ones. We use these for grammatical constructions (eg. pronoun on one, infinitive on another, timeframe on a further one), starters and sentence building speaking activities. Great fun and very engaging as the students can quickly build their dice and get started.

Cons: Free version limited to 6 dice, and there’s not much space on each face for text.

Are you enjoying the series of apps so far? What other types of apps that work in the classroom would  you like to find out about? Do let me know!

iPads are fantastic for creating what we could call ‘digital output’, ie. a product of learning that is more engaging, dynamic or sophisticated than putting old fashioned pen to paper.

I firmly believe that allowing students scope to create a product which is more tangible than just evidence, eg. the answers to an exercise, is hugely satisfying. Too often in non-practical classrooms there is a sense that the outcome is the process and there is no performance or product to demonstrate it.

Some of these apps allow students exactly that digital performance space, which they have told me makes it seem like there is a real point to getting to grips with a concept. Add an authentic audience into the mix and students will raise their game even further.

New apps in this genre come out all the time. However, my search thus far has been about finding apps which allow students to get stuck straight in without lengthy upskilling, and which create quick, easy-to-share outputs as there simply isn’t time in our schemes of work for students to spend weeks on a single creative project. More advanced iPad users can easily integrate these apps into more complex workflows, but they work equally well in isolation.

 Here’s my pick of the best digital output apps:

My favourite: Screenchomp (free)

 Pros: I’ve blogged about Screenchomp before as it was an easy win when we started the iPad project in school. It has remained a firm favourite. Few other apps allow students to record audio, create a dynamic simple hand-drawn screencast into which you can add pictures in such a pleasant environment. Easy upload and sharing options mean it is totally doable as a 10 minute activity in class.

Cons: Occasional crashes are par for the course. Embedding finished videos isn’t straightforward (certainly not in Google Sites anyway!)

The best of the rest:

 Comic Life (£2.99)

Pros: It’s easy to get started and produce professional looking comics, it’s intuitive and quick to share .pdf or .jpg versions of the finished comics.

Cons: Moving some of the elements around is fiddly and will frustrate perfectionists in the class. Producing a comic of a decent length requires an investment of time.

Songify (free)

Pros: Students love things that are a bit silly, and Songify doesn’t disappoint on that front. Record a voice saying something, eg. a list of vocabulary, press the button and then the magic happens: it creates a song out of the audio recording. Before you know it, the students will be ‘ singing’ along, competitively improving their recordings and listening to each others’ to see whose is best. Learning by stealth.

Cons: Free song choices are a bit limited and prose sounds very random. Lists are better!

In my next batch of app downloads, we’ll also be using PuppetPals and Book Creator for iPad which I’ve tested myself but have to unleash on my classes. Watch this space!

Looking for iPad apps that really work in the classroom?

My favourite: Soundcloud (free)

Best of the rest:

Hokusai Audio Editor (Free)

iTalk recorder (Basic version free, premium version £1.49)

This iPod app is fine for quick recordings but there is a limit on size in the free version which is really… limiting. It might work well with younger learners.

Coming soon: my favourite apps for writing in the classroom.