Show What You know

This week, Katrina Schwartz wrote a great blog piece on the uses of Educreations, and other interactive whiteboard type apps,  in the classroom. She notes that Replay Note, ScreenChomp, ShowMe, DoodleCast Pro, Knowmia, Explain Everything and Educreations all offer teachers the ability to record the visual and audio components of a “whiteboard” lesson on their iPads, and share it online. Schwartz is with KQED's MindShift which itself is a great resource for discussions about education trends, but I digress.


Although we have been using Educreations, Explain Everything, ShowMe and ScreenChomp fairly interchangeably over the past year since we got our 1:1 iPads, Educreations really is our "go to" app for this purpose.  In my classroom, students use these tools as a way to demonstrate their learning.  It really has helped them solidify their problem solving process, clarify their thinking and be able to articulate it using academic vocabulary. Last year I had a student who really struggled with math concepts. One day he had an ah-ha moment and declared that he must make a recording to share his discovery of how to solve double digit multiplication with the world!

What I would like to see is an easier way for students to share their work outside of the classroom without having their own account.  Our biggest challenge with almost every app has been the the lack of consistency of process in saving student work, getting it to a place where I can see and assess it and being able to show it to parents.  

So far, all of our used for these apps have been student based.  Students use the apps to share learnings in math, and Science and to develop literacy. Students love being able to use Educreations and other tools to demonstrate their knowledge and share it with their peers.  They are motivated to do their best work on an authentic and meaningful way.

Classroom Management, PD and How do we use these things to help kids learn?!

A few weeks ago, I bookmarked an interesting article in edudemic called 5 Critical Mistakes Schools Make With iPads (And How To Correct Them). To summarize, the five were (1) focusing on content only (and not being able to see that you could use showme in Math, for instance), (2) lack of teacher prep in classroom management, (3) expecting the iPad to be like a laptop, (4) treating iPads like a multi-user device and (5) failure to communicate a compelling answer to "why iPads?"

I will come back to 4 and 5 in future posts, but for now I want to focus on number two, lack of teacher preparation in classroom management of iPads.

I think we sometimes assume that because the Apple user interface is generally so smooth and intuitive that it should be simple to integrate the devices into our classroom practice. In our school district, we have adopted a pilot/academy model (discussed in previous posts and to the point of number 4 above). One of the outputs of our academy members is to document best practices in the classroom, so that as more teachers adopt this technology, they won't be starting at zero like we did. We started a wiki to help ourselves and other teachers not only by making app suggestions but by addressing issues such as synching our iPads with the cart, to use or not use Apple Configurator, classroom iPad rules and even how to velcro iPads to the cases!

However, the issue raised in the 5 Mistakes article is not so much the practical management of iPads, which we are addressing, but also the more pedagogical issue of how to incorporate these devices into the learning process.

Decades of research has shown that when teachers have access to new technologies, their instinct is to use new technologies to extend existing practices. 

Without guidance, iPads become expensive notebooks used by students in very traditionally structured stand-and-deliver classrooms. Teachers need time for professional collaboration (and often external support) to learn to nurture reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills and to develop strategies to differentiate instruction using a range of apps and tablet-friendly Web tools.

Clearly, we have more work to do!

Sharing Stories

Our kids collaborating to tell their stories and use Show Me to teach each other.