Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Monday, April 22, 2013
It's Not About Technology. It's About Teaching!
It doesn’t seem to matter whether I’m searching the internet for technology integration in the classroom or attending conferences, I keep running across a recurring theme: It’s not about the technology, it’s about pedagogy. It’s not about the iPad apps, it’s about the application of a new way of teaching. It’s not about teaching with technology, it’s about turning lectures into learning through problem solving. It’s about using technology for exploration, stimulation, collaboration, and presentation. Some of our teachers still use their interactive white boards like electric chalkboards, without changing their teaching methods. Let’s make sure that we get started on the right foot with the iPads.
Consider this (sorry, I've lost the source for this article)….
ZIS, a school in Switzerland, has distributed 600 iPads—one to every student in first through eighth grades, plus a set for teachers in preschool and kindergarten to use with children in small groups.
The school has an unconventional take on the iPad’s purpose. The devices are not really valued as portable screens or mobile gaming devices. Teachers I talked to seemed uninterested, almost dismissive, of animations and gamelike apps. Instead, the tablets were intended to be used as video cameras, audio recorders, and multimedia notebooks of individual students’ creations. The teachers cared most about how the devices could capture moments that told stories about their students’ experiences in school. Instead of focusing on what was coming out of the iPad, they were focused on what was going into it.
One morning I watched first-graders taking assessments of what they understood about “systems.” No pen-and-paper test was in sight. Instead, the teacher asked her students to come up with an example of a system and record a video of themselves explaining why their choice did, in fact, represent a system. A girl with a blond braid had drawn pictures of how people check out library books. With some technical guidance from the aide sitting next to her, and using an app called Explain Everything, she started arranging the pictures in a digital flow chart, adding arrows between her drawings of the book shelves, the checkout counter, the book at home, and the book being returned to the library. A few minutes later, she sat in a quiet corner by herself, pressed the record button, and explained each picture out loud. “My system is good,” she said at the end, “because if you don’t do something in my system, it will break down.”
In this case it’s not about learning a document, it’s about documenting learning!
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Future Posts
I hope to consider various topics in up-coming posts. Please feel free to submit topics or questions for submission to the leaning community.
Blog Revival
What I would really like to do with this blog is to have some of you post your ideas, suggestions, and needs for the rest of the leaning community. But, to get the ball rolling, let me share some of my background with you. As I've shared before, I'm a late-comer to Apple's iOS environment, although I've had a long background with Microsoft and Windows.
At the risk of sounding ... OLD, I've decided to post my technology background.
REFLECTIONS ..... From Teacher to Technology, a lesson in lifelong learning.
I didn't actually start with Microsoft and the Windows operating system. I began my computer training back in the '80's with the Radio Shack operating system called TRS-DOS (Tandy Radio Shack Disk Operating System). West Rome High purchased a number of TRS-80 computers (affectionately called "trash 80's) as our first computers. Costing approximately $600 (that was a lot of money back then) each, these computers had no hard drives, no internet access, and saved data on cassette tapes. A computer "expert" was brought in to train the teachers on how to use them. For the next several weeks we spent several planning periods typing in computer code using a computer language called BASIC. By the end of our training we could copy code from the board and create a white square on the computer screen with a white blip that bounced around inside! Yay! But, how could I use that to actually teach??
One of the math teachers was assigned to teach a BASIC programing class one period a day. The lab was unused the other five periods. Over the next few months I struggled with trying to figure out how to use those "idle" computers with my students. Eventually, with the help of the physics teacher, Bob Young, and one of his students, we came up with a BASIC program that allowed me to type in review questions and answers. Students would put in their answers and be told whether they were right or wrong with a flashing light that said, "GREAT JOB!" or "TRY AGAIN". Some of my early efforts to have the program randomly select multiple answer choices for students were comical. We still laugh when we remember a student receiving the following question and options:
How many legs does an insect have?
Arthropoda
Insecta
Crustacea
Six
I'll bet no one missed that question! LOL
Eventually, the school purchased Tandy 1000 computers and printers from Radio Shack for teacher use. These still had no hard drive. They used two 5.25 inch floppy drives. You inserted the program disk (Microsoft Works) into the A: drive and your data disk into the B: drive. Some teachers kept on using their old fashioned typewriters, while others used the computer as a typewriter, not even saving the document when they were finished! I took a RESA class to learn Microsoft Works. I was so excited to learn how to merge and copy between the spreadsheet, database, and document programs. Since I had a student teacher at the time, I flew through the tutorial program and became the teacher's assistant, helping some of the kindergarten teachers who had never even used an electric typewriter! To this day, I still keep question databanks in Excel and use them to create my tests for my college classes.
I later purchased my own computer and discovered immediately what is still an ongoing problem. As soon as you buy a computer, it's obsolete. Living on a teacher's salary I couldn't afford to buy a new one every time new hardware was developed. So I began to learn how to do things myself. When 3.5 inch floppy disks came out, I learned to install floppy drives. Later, when hard drives came out, I purchased and installed a hard drive for my ancient computer. In competition with Apple, Microsoft came out with Windows 3.1 which was a radical change from the old MS-DOS disk operating system. Of course, Windows 3.1 was followed by Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7, and now Windows 8. In my last year of teaching in the classroom I had accumulated approximately 18-20 computers that ran 3 different operating systems.
When the state began to require computer training for teachers, I took the In-Tech class from the Educational Technology Training Center (ETTC) and eventually became Captain of the In-Tech re-delivery team at Rome High. In this capacity I received a large TV and converter system to display my computer screen to the TV. I was now able to display PowerPoint for classroom lecture. I quickly found that I could now go much faster and students couldn't keep up. I decided to publish my notes on the web, at http://rcs.rome.ga.us/hargett, for students to print out ahead of time (not quite a "flipped" classroom but taking baby steps). So I had to learn the basics of web design and html coding. In those days we didn't have the ease and availability of free blogs and web pages that are available today. I placed my notes online with key terms and information deleted and replaced with blanks. Students could print this out ahead of time and come prepared to "fill-in" the missing information and add addtional information during lecture.
To make more time for classroom activities and lab, I took review worksheets and drill out of the classroom and made it available at home on my webpage also. Using a free program, called "Hot Potatoes", students could practice answering questions and check answers at home. However, in these early days, I often found that a significant portion of my class had no computer or internet access at home. In order to accomodate these students, I often had to use some class time for these students to have access to the information. As we move toward BYOT, we will need to keep this in mind today.
In my first year of teaching I frequently had to average my grades with a handheld calculator while sitting in the bleachers at a basketball game! Calculators were even new at that time. I bought my first one in college because we weren't allowed to use them in high school. After learning Excel, I began using and encouraging the use of spreadsheets to average grades. Eventually this gave way to the use of our first electronic gradebook and student information system, STI. This, of course, was followed by PowerSchool and you know the rest of that story.
In addition to encouraging students to use the computers for class, I often spent my planning time helping department members with computer problems, encouraging them in their computer use, and was eventually asked to become the webmaster for the Rome High webpage. All of this was instrumental in my being honored as the Rome City Schools Teacher of the Year in the fall of 2004.
Since retiring from the classroom, I have continued to use many of those early skills but find that there's always something new to learn. I have since had to learn Smartboard, how to use Excel in the export and upload of student and teacher usernames and passwords for multiple online programs, seen a drastic change in teaching from QCC objectives, to GPS performance standards, and the new Common Core Standards. Currently, I'm trying to come up to speed with Apple's iOS devices and their uses in the classroom and am looking forward to the use of BYOT and the incorporation of a multitude of devices (phones, ipods, ipads, tablets, laptops, etc.) in the classroom. Truly, to be an educator is also to be a lifelong learner.
Sorry for the long post. I TOLD you I had a long history. LOL!
Jeff Hargett
Monday, April 15, 2013
Project Based Learning (PBL)
When I began teaching science (back in the ‘70’s), we had lab books with prescribed materials, methods, and procedures to follow. Students had questions to answer, tables to fill in, and later a lab report to write. The lab report usually had a prescribed format, with little room for creativity. It was all about the data!
How different things can be today!
I ran across this example of a short project-based assignment from a teacher blog in Idaho
Today, I was reminded about the importance of giving students time to discover. I posted three questions on the board: How might water displacement help us find the density of a rock? What is the difference between weight, mass, and density? How could you use metrics in the answers to the above questions? I allowed them to use any of the tools, that we had available, to help them with these questions.
5 minutes into the assignment: students were pulling out rocks, graduated cylinders, scales, iPads, cups, water, and ice. Some students had started to draw sketches for hypotheses, while others were looking up definitions for needed vocabulary. Each of the six table groups, started to compile a mini-presentation to share with their peers.
30 minutes in the challenge: Keynotes/Powerpoints, demonstrations under document cameras, and tutorial videos were being created and put in to our work flow space in Edmodo.
Wow! An hour into this assignment, and the students are begging for 30 more minutes. As I look around, all thirty students are fully engaged and thinking. I was reminded about the importance of taking a step back, as the teacher, and allowing the students to have time to satisfy their natural curiosity.
How can YOU turn one of your prescribed group activities into a more open-ended problem or project? How can YOUR students use technology to answer the questions that you used to answer, using your classroom computers, iPads, etc.? How can they use technology to record their activity? How can they use technology to collaborate, present, and share their findings with you, their classmates, their parents, and the world?
Sorry, I’m not going to answer those questions for you. I’m going to leave it open-ended and marvel as you satisfy your natural curiosity! J
Like you, I am available, however, to answer questions and give guidance. Do you have a particular project that you would like to try, but are struggling with how the technology incorporation would work? Let’s collaborate.
Do you have a great example of a project, or an APP that you think everyone could use or adapt to their subject area? Let me know. Or better yet, use your technology to create, present, and share it. We can make it happen!
Scratchwork App
In the spirit of collaboration mentioned in my previous email this morning, I’d like to share a great app for note-taking and research on the iPad. It’s called Scratchwork.
Scratchwork allows you to pull up a side-by-side screen with your note-taking space on one side and a webpage on the other side, allowing you to take notes without flipping back and forth between two screens. When done, you can email the notes as text or pdf, or it will sync with a built-in web-storage option to a personal account at Box.net (5 Gb free for each personal account). Box.net allows students to log in individually so that the data would be available to them at home, or be available to them the next time they access the iPad.
Thanks to Holly Amerman from Rome High for sharing this one with me (as we talked at the grocery store) this week!
Keyboard Tips
Keyboard Tips
Those of you who are veterans of the iPhone may know this already. For those who are new, these tips are great time-savers.
One of the frustrating things about the Apple device’s touch-screen keyboard is the need to switch to a separate keyboard screen to type a period, comma, question mark or other punctuation. Well, consider that a thing of the past. Using this typing tip, you can add a period or other punctuation starting from and returning to the ABC keyboard using only one finger stroke.
Tip 1 - So here’s what you can do to type punctuation, all in one motion:
- Touch the “.123″ key, but don’t lift your finger as the punctuation layout appears.
- Slide your finger a half inch onto the period or comma key, and release.
- The ABC layout returns automatically. You’ve typed a period or a comma with one finger touch instead of three. In fact, you can type ANY of the punctuation symbols the same way.
- A similar approach can be used for capitalizing letters when typing.
Tip 2 - If you need to type an entire WORD in caps, tap the up-arrow (shift key) twice. It will put you into caps lock mode.
Tip 3 – Keyboard Shortcuts (for iPad only. I believe this no longer works for iPhone since the upgrade to iOS 6. If you have an older iPhone still running an earlier operating system, it may work. Some of you will let me know if I’m wrong, I’m sure!)
If you have a phrase or sentence that you type often, such as your email address, you can create a keyboard shortcut. Here’s how to add shortcuts:
- In the Settings app, tap on General > Keyboard.
- From there, you have a couple of choices on editing and creating your shortcuts.
- You can tap on “Edit” in the top right or tap on “Add New Shortcut…” at the lower part of the screen.
- You can now enter shortcuts. One you may want to enter is your email address.
- In the “Phrase” section, type in your email address. For the short cut, type eml. Tap “Save.”
- Now, open notes or any other app and type “eml.” Your email address will replace the phrase eml.
- Obviously, you will need to pick a short cut that is not part of the beginning of words you may use because you will never be able to type those words without the shortcut kicking in.
Monday, April 8, 2013
One of the Best iPad App Websites
Oh wow, what a great website! Here is a list of iPad Apps sorted by what you want them to do with the iPad rather than by subject area.
Check it out!
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