iPad apps for the classroom: Striking a balance

This year I am lucky enough to be getting six iPads for my classroom. This will give me a ratio of 1:4. If I use my personal iPad and my iPad mini, this could give me a ratio of 1:3 when I need it. (Plus one student brings his own iPad. Someone heard that iPads are good for kids with special needs so some kids have their own. That's another post for another time.) 
So I have come to the exciting part of the iPad journey - deciding which apps to load on the new iPads from the hundreds of thousands of apps available in the App Store.
I haven't got an unlimited budget but I don't want to download too many apps because it gets overwhelming. (To be honest, I'm not sure what my budget is, but I know it won't be infinite - I am lucky that I have been given the money for the iPads - I don't want to push the limits too far!)
Some of the free or cheaper apps are great and have been my "go to" apps up until now. (See my post on Sonic Pics and Pic Collage) Sometimes the old adage "you get what you pay for" really comes into play. The convenience of a good quality app that doesn't keep trying to sell you things is priceless.
Costs aside, I want to provide my students with a good range of apps so they can select the right tool for the right task.
I will provide them with some "drill and practice" and content type apps, and, of course, some logical thinking and strategy games, but the main purpose of the iPads will be as tools for learning, creating, sharing and collaborating. I want my students to be creative producers of knowledge, not passive consumers.
To assist in my quest for the right balance, I have started a Pinterest board for iPad apps for Year 2. I have put the links to the iTunes store and a brief description of each app. Hopefully this will make it easier next week to find them again and to select the ones that I decide I want now, or down the track. I am also hopeful that people will stumble across my Pinterest board and leave useful comments about how they have used these apps in their own classrooms.

I am working on a concept map that will hopeful clarify my thinking about how I intend to use the iPads with the students and which apps will best meet these needs. I will update this post as I go until I have worked it out.

Collaborative Planning using Web 2.0

This year I am beginning in a new role as Curriculum Support Teacher at my school. I am very excited as I am absolutely passionate about curriculum and I love to share my enthusiasm with others and (hopefully) help them to ignite a passion for teaching and curriculum too.

I will have three days a week in my new role and two days a week in my Year 2 classroom - the best of both worlds!

This will mean that I will have to relinquish a lot of the responsibility for the classroom goings on. My new teaching partner is enthusiastic about coming on board so hopefully she will survive the first little part of the year while I am learning not to be such a control freak. After (more than) 10 years of being able to do my own thing, I am going to need to adjust to the idea of sharing. It will be good for me. ;-)

After the huge learning curve I experienced last year when my life was opened up to the world of blogging, twitter, pinterest, dropbox, evernote and other ways of reflecting on, organising and sharing my teaching experiences, I am keen to support other teachers at my school to take the plunge!

I have just set up a collaborative Pinterest Board for the Life Stages topic that we will likely be studying in first term. 

I invited my fellow Year 2 teachers but so far I haven't had any responses. (Most probably because they are enjoying the last moments of their holidays before we have to come back to work!) I am hoping that this will be a new way of sharing our ideas that will be quick, simple, fun and collaborative. I don't expect that any of us will be able to do even half of the activities that I have pinned already but Pinterest is a nice visual display of resources. The collaborative board will be kind of like a menu of ideas that people can pick and choose from, and if there is nothing there that they like, they don't need to choose any. Hopefully they will add to the ideas as well.

In the past we have shared links in emails but sometimes we get a lot of these types of emails from each other and it can take a while to check all the links and try to work out what idea on the page the other person thought was relevant. Often I get one of these emails and read the first part and think "I'll check this out later" and then bury it in my disorganised inbox, never to be seen again. 

I have tried searching my inbox (either using the approximate date, the person who I think I can remember that sent it to me, or a possible keyword) and this sometimes works but can be very time consuming. I am hoping Pinterest will open up a new and better way for us to collate our ideas so we can retrieve them easily when we need them.

My teaching team are wonderful, and even though they think I am a little crazy, they usually give things a go just to humour me.

If this works, I am hoping this will be an effective and time-efficient tool for supporting the curriculum in my school.

I am also in the process of setting up a blog for my new role that will be situated within the walled-garden of our LIFE Learning Management System. Hopefully using LIFE like this will help me to get used to it so I can apply it more effectively in my classroom as well.

My hope is that I can share information with my colleagues about curriculum matters in a way that is easy for them to access when they need to without overwhelming them with too many emails which may or may not be of interest to them.

I think this year is going to be full of challenges for me, learning to use these tools in new ways and supporting others in beginning a journey to more collaborative practice using Web 2.0.

What tools do you use for collaborative planning?

How do you share your ideas with your colleagues at your school?

Express Yourself!

In any classroom attempting to hear everyone’s point of view is a challenge. In a class discussion only a small number of children can share before the responses are exhausted or the attention has dissipated. Attempting to visit each individual to hear discrete responses is time consuming and impractical. Individual interviews also rob the students of the opportunity to learn collaboratively. By the time I get around to my fast mathematical thinkers and ask them to explain how they reached their solution, the moment has passed and their responses are usually along the lines of “I just knew it”.

This project aimed to explore ways that digital technology could be employed in an early years classroom to allow gifted learners to express their knowledge and understanding in different subject areas by capturing thought processes and ideas in a timely manner and establishing a means of sharing ideas.

The group of learners targeted in this project are capable young students with an energetic thirst for variety in their learning experiences and a cheeky sense of creativity. These students are keen to share their opinions on issues and are capable of lightning fast thinking, particularly in Mathematics. Without a challenge the have the propensity to become challenging, hence, their super-powers must be harnessed for good, not evil.

My challenge became discovering ways that I could capture my students’ thought patterns and opinions and provide them a platform for sharing their thinking with an audience beyond their teacher.

Through this project, I experimented with a number of hardware and software options in order to discover ways that the students could successfully communicate their ideas. Often the first experiences needed to be heavily scaffolded, but the idea behind the project is to assist the students in developing the skills so they can work more independently later.

We used laptops, digital cameras, microphones, and iPads in our experiments but the iPad became the tool of choice due to its ease of use, portability, and availability in our classroom.

Two projects were most notably successful in allowing the students to express their ideas with a degree of independence: an enhanced poster with a short persuasive video embedded via a QR code, and brief explanations of mathematical thinking captured using the Explain Everything app.

Our first success was the result of a great number of failed attempts. As the teacher I was definitely in the learner seat on this project. The children were enthusiastic about learning and were happy to be part of the experiment. They were not easily put off by our setbacks. The process which eventually resulted in success involved the children combining quite a number of the skills they already had as well as integrating a few skills that were new to me as well.

The students had been involved in a whole class inquiry into how people, pets and native animals can live together sustainably. Towards the end of our investigation the students suggested a number of ways that we could change our behaviour to make our school and home environments more friendly for native animals.

Working in pairs, students selected one of the class suggestions and came up with three supporting reasons for their proposal. They created a visual image using a free iPad app called Pic Collage.

The pair of Year 2 students then worked with some Year 5 buddies to turn their ideas into a short persuasive speech. The Year 5s had developed some good persuasive writing skills due to copious amounts of NAPLAN preparation earlier in the year so we decided to put these skills to a much better use.

The Year 2s then used the iPads again and an app called Sonic Pics to record their speech using the image they created earlier in Pic Collage app as an illustration.

The students have used Sonic Pics for a number of projects throughout the year so this was a more practical choice than iMovie or other similar apps.

Once the students had created their recording I helped them upload the file to my YouTube channel.

Since it was the first time I had created QR codes with the students, I assisted them in doing this, but now they know the process, they may be able to do this step themselves in future tasks.

The students designed posters to promote their message and painted these. Once dry, they fixed the QR code onto the poster.

We displayed the posters around the school, and as part of the Australia Post Kids Teaching Kids Week activities, the Year 2 students demonstrated to a class of Year 1 students how to use the Scan app on the iPad to read the QR code and watch the movie they had created.

The students were so proud of their achievements that we later showcased this work again for our parents. If you would like to see their work, visit our class blog. The students love to receive comments about their work!

This experience with flexible and creative technology will now allow me to set more interesting challenges for the students, with confidence that they have the technical skills to share their ideas and thoughts with others.

Our second project involved a small group of students who are particularly talented in Mathematics. These young students competently add three-digit numbers requiring regrouping in their heads and have developed their own strategies for dealing with more complex calculations and larger numbers.

Even though I have worked with the whole class on using a variety of addition strategies in Mathematics, these students had difficulty explaining how they were getting their answers. Their responses were either: “I just knew it” or they would give me the name of a random strategy that we had discussed in class but couldn’t articulate why that had helped.

I was keen to assist these children in developing some skills in explaining their thinking because I know that they are going to be asked to “show their working” many times in their schooling.

There seemed little point in holding them back with the regular Year 2 curriculum when their mathematical reasoning appeared to be beyond this level, but I also wanted to be confident that their methods were grounded in logic and that they had a variety of effective strategies for basic calculations.

Rather than limiting their thinking about addition to one rigid algorithm and subjecting them to hundreds of repetitions, I encouraged them to use a variety of strategies and to attempt to explain what they were doing to demonstrate their mastery of the basic concepts.

At first the explanation process was awkward and slow, often not making sense to anyone but themselves, but since they were able to capture their thinking using Explain Everything on the iPad and play it back, as well as access the thinking of other students in the group, they eventually improved.

The next stage of this project will be to give these students an audience and purpose beyond having to justify their thinking to a teacher.

I plan to use the QR code idea again to create a series of “help posters” that can be used by other class members who might need further explanation on a particular strategy. Another future project might involve creating a “Maths Expert” blog as a platform for the students to showcase their thinking but also provide a service to a much wider audience.

The challenges in exploring this project were not related to the students but involved the limits of the technology in the setting. With no carpet and an unsealed dividing wall, the classroom is not the ideal location for creating good quality recordings. I experimented with many options for improving the sound quality and have still not discovered the ideal solution. Also, since the iPads are shared across the school and we get access to different iPads at random, tracking down the students work or continuing on saved work presented a number of challenges.

Despite these limitations, the project was successful in discovering new ways of capturing student thoughts and ideas and in empowering young learners to express themselves.

The Meaning of LIFE

Today I attended my second day of training in the LIFE Learning Management System. In spite of my own reservations about the suitability of this product for my particular needs over other available software by this afternoon I felt much more confident about how this product might be used in my school to enhance teaching and learning.
I have three main concerns about this learning management system and the way that it is being rolled out across the system I am working in (or at least in my own school).
Firstly, the package is not as useful for my early years classroom as it might be in other settings. I see that LMS can be very beneficial for tertiary and secondary educational settings,  in organising coursework, communicating between teachers and students and allowing collaboration between learners with flexible timing, however, I am currently teaching Year 2 (7 year-olds). Simply plonking something that it great for adult learners into an early childhood setting is not necessarily a good idea.
The process of logging in to the program, digging through the pages to the activity of the day is not simple and is made frustrating by the very slow loading. The "one-stop shop" package presents some advantaged in keeping the activities in one place and some uniformity across activities, but the tools themselves are not as useable and useful as other Web 2.0 tools freely available on the web, and much simpler for my young learners to access.
Secondly, the program is being forced randomly into our practice, rather than being used to address particular needs. At my school there are three teachers who are being trained in the first round and trying to implement the package. Due to the physical distance between our classrooms and the fact that we are in different grade levels spread across the school, it is difficult to feel like we are being supported by each other through this process. In our school we are expected to plan in Year level teams
(consisting of around 4 teachers) but each of us trialling LIFE are in different teaching teams, so we plan units, activities and assessments with our team and then go off on our own and try to "invent" reasons to implement LIFE into our planning and do this on top of everything that the other classes on our year level are doing. If our whole team was using LIFE then needs would arise during the planning phase (e.g.: how can we get our students to collaboratively brainstorm their initial thoughts on the topic) and then some of these needs would be able to be met with LIFE. The use of technology should be to solve an existing problem, not to create new ones. Our current approach is arbitrary implementation to use technology for technology's sake.
Finally, I strongly believe that the strength of technology (including LMS, Web 2.0 tools, iPads and the like) is the ability to enable true collaboration amongst learners. The LIFE LMS system is a walled vault. No-one from outside can see what my class is doing and they can't communicate with anyone beyond those that they could easily turn their heads and talk to. Where is the point in using a cumbersome program to talk to the person who is sitting beside you? How is this providing students with a real audience and a sense that they are part of a global community?
As learners ourselves, the program restricts teachers from easily sharing ideas about what they are doing. I can't view the great activities that might be being done at other schools within my system and I can't make contact with other teachers who might be working through the same issues as me.
The team implementing the LMS at a system level created a collaborative workspace for staff. One of the team wrote a post on a discussion board inviting questions and discussion. After my first training session I responded to this post and asked a question and also started my own conversation thread. Two months later there have been 7 views of the original thread (mostly by me) and only one view of my starter (which I think was me also). No-one, even the person who set up the collaborative discussion board, has bothered to read or respond to the conversation threads. Why are we hell-bent on having our 7-year-olds collaborating using the software if we don't see a place for such collaboration in our own professional learning?

So, this morning I voiced my concerns (quite strongly because I was feeling very frustrated) and to the credit of the person facilitating the training session, by this afternoon, I truly felt that my concerns had been heard and that there is some future for this initiative after all.

I am proposing to our principal that we change tact from our original implementation plan (which, in fairness, was devised before any of us knew much about what we were doing). I propose that the teachers who are in the initial implementation phase be placed in a single year level teaching team to address the concern that it is being treated as an adhoc and ill-fitted addition to our existing planning. I would suggest that year level would be older than Year 2 to increase the likelihood of initial success. Finally, I have proposed that we begin to use the tools as staff for our own collaborative planning so that all staff begin to develop a sense of what the program offers and how to use it before they are expected to implement it in their own classes.

After today, I am very confident that the LIFE Learning Management System can have a positive impact on the teaching and learning in my school.