My New Blog

I haven't posted for a while for a few reasons. One of them is that I have been unbelievably busy, but that's nothing new for anyone in education. Another reason is that I have discovered Twitter. The main reason is that I have not been feeling inspired to blog as I feel this blog has been a great way of documenting the school's, and my own, journey from early on. I am happy to say things have changed, as they always should, and while we certainly haven't changed direction we are having a play with the course settings. Don't worry, my love affair with iPads has not ended. I still think they are one of the best tools out there for schools but there are some other great ones too. I, just this morning, created a new blog called Teaching with (and without) Technology at KPS. The blog address is www.teachingwithtechnologyatkps.blogspot.com and there I will continue our journey with iPads, talk about some of the amazing tools I use in the Digital Technologies learning area share all sorts of ideas and thoughts - don't worry not just my own. Feel free to follow me on Twitter - I'm not that interesting but I do follow some very cool people - @KpsKreghenz. Oh and don't get too excited about my new blog - I haven't posted anything yet!
 I have used Lulu Publishing to publish a colour paperback copy of most of the blog posts from this blog. It turned out very cool. If you are interested in purchasing a copy go to the link below.

 Fully Bloggin' It @ KPS

My Story

For some reason I have chosen today to share my personal story so here goes, for people that don't already know it, ... I was a misunderstood child ... just joking, I meant my personal iPad story.

I have to admit I have always been a bit of a gadget geek but I have also never rushed out and purchased the latest thing. I like to wait for people to discover and fix the bugs and for prices to come down. The first time I ever saw an iPad was a TV advertisement in early 2011. I wasn't impressed and didn't really see what it had on a laptop, apart from rotating orientation. At that time, in my year 2 class, I had a student with autism. She received an iPad from an autism organisation and her mother bought it in to show me - it was love at first sight. I saw so much potential for the iPad in the classroom. Soon after, I bought my first iPad and I took it to school. I used it with the whole class and particularly with my student with autism. I had to buy myself another one so I could gave a play too.  

As I had been using an iPad in my classroom, when KPS was selected to be part of the early childhood iPad initiative, I was selected to be the school project coordinator. At that time my role was really on the device management and deployment side but, as a year 2 classroom teacher, I also got to use a set of iPads in the classroom. At this stage we had a great time playing with commercial apps but I also created texts for guided reading along with some sight word resources. The following year, at the same time as I moved into a specialist IT teacher role we became one of 10 schools in WA to be regarded as a lighthouse school as part of the ILNNP iPad component. Part of my role last year and this year is to provide support to classroom teachers in their implementation of iPads as a tool in the classroom. This has been provided via this bog, professional development during PD days, staff meetings and after school sessions as well as in class support and modelling.

During the last 2 and a half years that we have been using iPads we have had 1 visit from the Apple Education Team, 3 visits from the ILNNP iPad Consultant and I and another staff member have attended workshops in Perth provided for ILNNP Lighthouse Schools. These workshops and visits mostly provided us with a way of seeing how other schools are using iPads and enabled us to see some of the possibilities. We have also sought out and engaged in Professional Learning by other providers.  All of this was invaluable in our journey but, being quite isolated in Kalgoorlie, we still encountered many roadblocks and issues along the way including planning for deployment, setting up and syncing, working out VPP, engaging and providing support to teachers, wi-fi infrastructure, charging and storage, setting up Apple TVs, ensuring we were using best practice, using the SAMR model and many, many more. All of these issues we had to solve for ourselves but we saw them as challenges, not problems.

For me, it has been empowering overcoming problems as they arise and making sure that iPads are a useful addition to our school. Lucky for me, I absolutely love being a teacher and can genuinely say I look forward to every day with excitement. There is not an evening or a weekend that has gone by in the last 2 years that I haven't spent at least some time on an iPad with the intention of improving how we are using iPads at our school. Initially I spent a lot of time researching and testing apps that we could use then I moved onto finding ways that we could develop resources to differentiate learning. I now spend most of the time exploring web based resources, learning management systems and lesson delivery options along with apps that can be used to develop personalised activities.

Why did I decide to tell this story? Because I want to share that I am thrilled with where KPS is in regard to iPads and I know we can do even better. We have certainly received some support in our journey but most of it has come through hard work and commitment from staff. Our mantra is "Pedagogy first, technology second" and as easy as iPads are to set up and use, they are just as easy to put away when they are not relevant to a lesson. Introducing any new tool to every teacher in a school and making sure they use it appropriately to enhance their teaching doesn't happen without hard work.

My New Favourite App

From what I can work out this App came out earlier this year and I can't believe it has taken me this long to find it. I must have been napping.

Basically it is an iPad app in which you can create animated videos from photos. Nothing new there - we have SonicPics and Animoto (that I still love) but this one is beyond simple! You can choose from thousands and thousands of Creative Commons and public domain still images or you can use your own, it offers eight different story structures with prompts and ideas or you can just go for it, there are five different layouts for your photos, there are 32 different and wonderful themes, there 37 instrumental tracks to set the right mood and video hosting is built in for easy sharing as your finished masterpiece can be viewed an a phone, tablet, computer, etc. You can make your videos private or public and I am sure you would be able to link them to a QR code although I haven't tried this yet - I was too excited about sharing the app.

You just add photos and talk your story and the app makes it all look and sound amazing! Have I convinced you yet? Do you want to know the name of the App so you can grab your iPad and download it immediately? That's what I thought. The App is called Adobe Voice and it is FREE!

Blended Learning

In preparation for our BYOD trial next year, I have been thinking about some of the many blended learning tools that are already useful with a shared model but will be even more useful for a 1:1environment.
The following tools are basically Learning Management Systems - you would need to select one of these to use for the whole class:

Edmodo is an educational website that is sort of a cross between a social network and a learning management system. Using Edmodo, students and teachers can reach out to one another and connect by sharing ideas, problems, and helpful tips.The Edmodo interface resembles Facebook, which makes it instantly popular with students! Edmodo can be implemented by a single teacher for their class, with no technical expertise required to get started.Once you have created a class (or a school) you can invite students and other teachers to join the class by providing a unique code for that class. (It is worth keeping an eye on enrolments to ensure that students are enrolling as ‘students’, not ‘teachers’.) Each student has a unique ‘Parent code’ that can be provided to parents to view only their child’s assignments and contributions to discussions.

 Schoology leans a little more towards being a LMS than Edmodo while maintaining an easy-to-use ‘social network’ interface. Schoology can be implemented by a single teacher for their class, with no specialist technical expertise required to get started. Sign-up, and away you go. As a teacher (or, as Schoology describes you, an Instructor) you create Courses, add materials to the courses – assignments, quizzes, files and links, discussions, photo albums and web pages. Schoology also provides a Gradebook, which is auto-populated with Assignments and Quizzes that you have created for a course. Schoology includes an Analytics feature, where you can check student participation in Assignments, Discussions, and their use of provided course web links.

Classroom is a new tool coming to Google Apps for Education. Classroom will weave together Google Docs, Drive and Gmail to help teachers create and organise assignments quickly, provide feedback efficiently, and communicate with their classes with ease. It will let students organise their work, complete and turn it in, and communicate directly with their teachers and peers. Classroom automatically will create Drive folders for each assignment and for each student. Students will easily see what’s due on their Assignments page, so they can stay on top of their work. Classroom will also let teachers make announcements and start discussions—improving communication inside and outside of class.

The following tools are options for presenting lessons and assessing:

Showbie is a FREE app that can be used to create and collect assignments right from the iPad. You create a free teacher account and you are able to create classes within the app. You receive a code for each class for your students to connect with. It is like a drop box for the classroom. Using Showbie, students can submit pictures, video, podcasts, presentations and other work from hundreds of apps into their Showbie online assignment folder. Teachers use the Showbie iPad app to easily review students’ work and provide rich feedback with annotations and voicenotes.  

Nearpod allows teachers to construct presentations using the Nearpod website and deliver instruction to students by pushing content out to multiple devices at once.  The teacher can control the presentation from a master iOS device, while students follow along on a class set of iPads. To enliven instruction, teachers can also embed multiple choice questions, polls, videos, quizzes, open-ended questions, and web-links in their presentations. It is also possible to pay for a gold membership so that lesson can be presented in a way that let's students work at their own pace or for homework.

Blendspace is an online multimedia Web tool for teachers and students to create presentations, WebQuests, projects, online courses and more! Blendspace is integrated with Edmodo and, in your lessons, you can pull resources from YouTube, Dropbox, Google Drive, Flickr, Website Links, My Computer, Bookmarks and more! Multiple choice questions can be embedded into lessons.

Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers by engaging their classrooms with a series of educational exercises and games. Our apps are super simple and take seconds to login. Socrative runs on tablets, smartphones, and laptops.

ThingLink

I came across this app a long time ago and I could see huge potential but I didn't really have a chance to have a proper play. I have now had a bit of a play and I love it. What a great way for students to present a report - about anything at all! You can add web links, text, links to youtube clips just from an image. What is even better is it is web based so can be shared so easily.

The one I have pasted below is a quick muck up of the type of thing you might get students to create - but with much more research and more links and facts. I created my image in PicCollage, saved it to my camera roll and accessed it through the ThingLink app. It took me a total of 30 minutes and the app is so easy to use.

Animals of the Amazon

Game Making on iPads

As the way I use iPads has evolved over the past couple of years I find that I most value the iPad as a tool for  personalising learning, for assessment and for collecting evidence of student achievements and for promoting student creativity. For these purposes apps such as Edmodo and Nearpod are invaluable for personalising learning and apps such as Book Creator are invaluable for collecting evidence and artefacts and apps such as iMovie, PuppetPals, GreenScreen, Tellagami are excellent for student creativity. For assessment, their are so many options such as apps that collect data when students sign in, taking screenshots of students' results on an app and using screen casting apps like Educreations and Explain Everything to record students' understanding of various concepts.

My favourite way to assess is to have students create games for other students to use. This way games are created that are relevant to the content being taught in your classroom and you will see from how well the game is created, how well the student understands the topic. TinyTap has been (and still is) one of my favourite apps to use for this purpose. The only problem is the games are not editable so if students do make a mistake when they create their game, while you can still use this to assess their understanding, they then need to remake the entire game for it to be useful. I recently discovered another excellent app that can be used for this purpose.

StickAround, unlike many of my other favourite apps, is not free but it is well worth its $3.79. It is available on Apple's Volume Purchasing Program which takes is back to $1.90 if you purchase over 20 copies. I won't go into details about how StickAround works because there is a great deal of information on the website at www.learninginhand.com/stickaround. The website contains video tutorials, user guides, a blog and more. Basically you use StickAround to create puzzles on any topic. Some suggestions they make on the website are:

• place locations on a map
• tag parts of the body
• place items where they belong on a chart
• complete a graphic organizer
• annotate the water cycle
• label people in a photo
• diagram a sentence
• associate powers with the branches of government
• sequence events on a timeline
• associate words and definitions
• label the parts of a plant
• put words in alphabetical order
• fill in a Venn diagram
• match photos of animals to their habitats

What a great way to assess student understanding! These puzzles are fully editable from the project page so, if students do misunderstand the concept, their games can then be fixed. Once completed and repaired, puzzles can be saved to non-editable versions and they can be shared using GoogleDrive.

Obviously TinyTap and StickAround are also more than excellent for creating personalised games/puzzles for students to play.

iPad Continuum

At KPS the iPad Committee has spent the last couple of meetings developing a document to help teachers map their own progress in their use of iPads as a tool for the classroom. This document is focussed not so much on how students are using iPads but more on the types of lessons teachers are planning and is organised as a continuum, with each stage building on the last. Hopefully this will make it easier for teachers to reflect on their use of this amazing technology and see what else they can do to ensure they are using the iPad to its full potential for the benefit of their students. The document is pictured below.

Tutorial on how to create a virtual green screen project

I created this tutorial using SnapGuide:
http://snapguide.com/guides/create-a-virtual-green-screen-project