The students have been learning lots this week. I’ve popped in a few times and have been impressed at the speed at which they seem to pick things up. I continue to be quite amazed at how tools such as the ones provided by devices such as iPads seem to provide a means by which students can express their creativity. Of course, they also allow students to express their understandings and to communicate their ideas but the whole area of creativity is one that does delight me. It seems to be that they are just so playful with technology and so unafraid to experiment and to add fun elements to their learning journey. Of course, this whole playful aspect can sometimes get distracting for them and the people watching. There were a number of students this week who were playing with the inversion of colour option with the display, for example. As they were completing the task they had been directed to do, they were also delighting in the parallel task of assigning different inversions of colour and then seeing its effect both on the home screens and within the task they were doing. For most students, this was certainly a ‘parallel’ task that they were doing in a simultaneous fashion while completing their work. For others, I think, this became the focus over the task! This is all part of the learning that is happening though as we get used to different ways of working.
They have been using Explain Everything (see tutorial at bottom of this page) to create some movies of various maths concepts. This week this included their ideas about place value. The students would sit with each other, sometimes making the actual movie together and talk their way through the creation of the movie. I think the use of this screencasting app, ‘Explain Everything’ is one of the most powerful things students can use their devices for. Quite simply, it makes learning visible. This can be of assistance to the child making the movie, the others working with the child and the teacher for assessment purposes. The notion of audience is also a very powerful things for learners and it is possible to create a bank of such videos to share with other outside the classroom walls. MathTrain, an online classroom in the USA, is the result of a group of students doing just this.
Hopefully, we will soon have some of these videos to share. At the moment, they need to work on the idea of getting work ready for publication which involves looking at their spelling, punctuation and grammar!
I also had a chance to have a chat to a few individual children and to the whole class about how they are going being in this BYOD trial class. The overwhelming impression I got was one of excited enthusiasm.
Positives that were mentioned to me:
“We are learning more about technology with everything we do”.
“It’s like taking all your books home so you can finish anything you need to at home.”
“We really liked working together to make a movie about place value.”
“It helps us to learn – ‘Explain Everything’ lets you add lots of cool things and you can explain how to do things.”
“Flashcardlet lets you create flashcards which help us in our spelling. The star means you are still learning and the tick means you have learnt it”
Challenges that were mentioned to me:
“Sometimes it is hard to focus when the iPad is sitting there on your desk and you have to have it closed.”
“The proxy settings box is always popping up and we get sick of it.”
Access to the Internet and WiFi settings seeming to drop out is certainly a challenge at the moment. Jason and I have started to put WiFi profiles on everyone’s iPad to see if this eases the problem. Another thing I talked to the students about is making sure Location Services is turned off. This is found within Privacy in Settings. If this is turned off it will ensure that apps that constantly need to access the Internet in terms of location won’t need to do this. They can certainly turn this back on when at home, especially if apps like ‘Find my iPhone’ are needed. The students should also consider restarting their iPad at the beginning of each day and ensuring that open tabs to different internet sites is limited to just the one they are using at the time.
We have also observed that students who don’t already have independent study habits seem to be struggling at times. This is because of the nature of the learning – in that individual pathways are becoming apparent and that many are ready able to access them. In order to be able to harness this kind of learning however, students need to be focussed on their own pathway and what they need to do. This can be challenging for those who seem more inclined to wait for individual attention and teacher urgings. This would however, be the same in a classroom with or without 1-1 devices. It will be interesting to see how this progresses with such students and whether these students progress in their ability to work independently BECAUSE of the nature of the classroom and the presence of 1-1 technology which we believe enables learning.
Here’s a tutorial on Explain Everything that might be quite useful. It might be helpful to mention that I have seen the students using tools within Explain Everything I didn’t know about over the last few days. I’ve been using it for a couple of years and most of them have only just started – further evidence of the playful, confident and exploratory attitude that children take to devices such as these.
Nicola