Penultimate for iPad

A friend and colleague introduced me to this stunning App today. She teaches in science and can imagine all kinds of creative uses for it in her subject area. The calligraphy pen is easy to use and replicates handwriting in a smooth, un-cluncky way that makes the App especially easy to use. All the curves of your letters are beautifully formed and everything is completed with your finger-no need for a keyboard!



On Penultimate you can write or draw in a variety of colours on plain, lined or graph paper. Additional paper styles can be purchased from the App store. Pictures can be imported or you can draw your own illustrations. You can share your note books as PDF files or export your notebooks to iTunes. Each notebook is bound in a simple moleskin style leather binding and has a title, the date the notebook was made and the date of the last update.



Also checkout Handwriting for iPod and iPhone another App by Cocoabox that does exactly what you would expect - takes beautiful handwritten notes. I will be adding it to the collection on the Learning Pod devices.

http://www.cocoabox.com/penultimate
http://www.cocoabox.com/
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

iPad engagement

I'm at the National Media Museum in Bradford, making some notes on a photographic exhibition, harsh documentary landscape with military subjects. A small crowd of children gather round to see the iPad.

One little boy asks to try it out and I let him write his name. 'Abdil', he types it out carefully, one letter at a time. Other children write their names. I'm like the Pied Piper, I have to stop again and more children do the same, 'Esa, Salina, John, Musa, Laiba, Vaneesa, Leah', they type out their names in the middle of the notes I'm making on the photographs of Donovan Wylie.

The power of the iPad to engage and inspire, the potential to turn children into writers.

I was at the Media Museum Bradford, where a new exhibition entitled, Life on Line, opens March 2012. This exhibition explores the way the Internet has changed our lives as individuals and as a society.

http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/

Social Networking and Learning

Ongoing research into how social networking influences young people is raising some interesting questions. The ostrich approach to social networking and how it influences our learners is quick to condemn. But the research referred to in this article raises a series of more discerning questions about social networking and participation in learning. It help us as educators make some important distinction between how young people use social networking sites like Facebook and how this might link to their learning.

What insights do you have into why some activities like commenting and viewing photos seem to encourage participation in school life?
What insights do you have as to why other activities such as posting photos and playing games are negatively predictive of such engagement?

Unfortunately, governments and then by extension high school teachers having knee-jerk negative evaluations of social media negates any possibility of examining the academic benefits of such sites. It also shows a great misunderstanding of how social media can be used for both social and educational good.

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/q-and-a-how-facebook-usecorrelates-with-student-outcomes/?partner=rss&emc=rss

When the learners lead

When the leaders learn, the teacher stands back and watches in amazement and with great respect!

Very early on when the children had only had the iPods for a few days, we were working at our humanities project on China. I had made a folder of Apps about China and the pupils were using them to make a mind map using SimpleMind. The China Apps were a strange assortment and I wasn't especially proud of the quality of the material. The App on the Teracotta Army (Art Gallery of NSW) was of especially high quality but other Apps, mainly those designed for tourists were mixed.

I think what happened represented the kind of shift in learning that I had hoped for. I noticed all across the classroom pupils were plugging into their head sets and murmmerings in a new language were filling the room. The pupils had stumbled across Chinese language teaching Apps and they were teaching themselves to say 'hello' and count to ten in Chinese. It represented a small step in learning with huge potential for how we can use the iPods to transform learning from passive to active, for how the teacher can become less and the pupils can become more. I had become the facilitator and they became lead learners and I hadn't had to try that hard.

Towards the end of the lesson, one pupil brought her mind map to show me. It looked really good and represented a lot of hard work on her part. She had also saved several pictures to her camera roll and she wanted to know how she could add them to the mind map. This pupil wanted to develop her learning, she had her own ideas about how she wanted to represent her research. Her enquiry makes me even more convinced of the potential available to us using iPods to transform learning.

Sadly Simplemind does not let you add pictures. Anyone out there know of a mind mapping App that will let you add pictures? Let me know !

Reading a Booker shortlisted novel on my iPad

I always follow the Booker Prize, from the longlist and shortlist announcements through to the big night, which in recent years I've followed on twitter. I love to read and have a mostly old-fashioned relationship with my favourite pastime. I still prefer independent booksellers and I have been known to select a volume purely on the quality of the binding. So I am a little surprised to be promoting iBooks so enthusiastically. I've just purchased Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch, a great writer who I am lucky enough to count as a friend. I found it easily enough in the iBook store and purchasing it was as simple as entering my Apple PIN. (Incidentally, it's a great read!)

Turning the page of your newly purchased ibook, using the little red book mark, looking up a word in the dictionary or annotating the text, the functions of iBooks are a show case for everything that is beautiful about Apple products. As a book lover I feel that the maker of this product has truly understood what it is I love about a book and has captured that in pure digital mastery.

Many parents have asked me if I will stil be using hard copy for reading in class and the answer is a resounding, YES. In class we will use electronic and hard books, just as we will use Pages and write with a pencil. Research suggests that once digital learners become engaged in their learning they are more likely to start accessing a greater variety of learning resources and this usually includes borrowing more books from the library.

iBooks is a straightwards way of accessing reading material that I'm recommending to all the young readers in my class. I have purchased for them twenty sample chapters of books and after the hioliday we will have a class vote to decide which books we shall buy in full. They get to choose from some great children's writers including Antony Horowitz, Louise Rennison, Lemony Snicket, Malorie Blackman, Terry Pratchett, Jacqueline Wilson and Eoin Colfer.

However, a word of warning if you are considering a similar reading project in school. The iBook free samples are great but you need to check them because whereas some publishers give readers a whole chapter for free other publishers give little more than a front cover and a bibliography of the author's other published works.

Partnering with Parents

The parents blame it on the teachers and the teachers blame it on the parents but it is obvious that successful learning can only happen when there is a strong home school relationship.
Last night I met the Learning Pod parents and the Learning Pod pupils had a chance to show off their devices.

It was a great opportunity to surprise, shock and inspire the parents with the iPod learning potential. Many parents, especially those who are not iPod/iPhone users find it hard to imagine how the devices can be used to support meaningful learning. Seeing the children at work really helped the penny to drop and I'm delighted that so many are choosing to partner with us through a voluntary donation scheme run by the E-Learning Foundation.

http://www.e-learningfoundation.com/

Many parents have asked to come into school next term for some hands on sessions, using the iPods and equipping themselves to support their own child 's learning when the devices go home at the end of the month. We had some great conversations and I look forwards to building on this very productive home school relationship.

Using blogs

I have been getting ready for using blogs in the Learning Pod and have found this research article by Russell Beale, University of Birmingham exactly what I needed to focus my thinking.

http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ewic_hc07_sppaper1.pdf

Russell Beale writes from a higher education setting, but I share his view that blogging should encourage pupils to develop more of a sense of community in their group and that secondly learners will benefit from see the reflections and comments of their peers on learning.

However, whilst I have found the article very useful I also had some reservations about another idea present in the pedagogy. Russell Beale writes,

From a social and pedagogical perspective, blogging provides two advantages. The first is that it can support a sense of community amongst the students. They can read and comment on other students postings, and can learn from both experiences that others have discovered, and from the insights of their peers regarding those experiences. In this way, exceptional students can forge into the unknown, being opinionated, making deep insightful comments on the state of the world, the role of HCI, or anything else, whilst the weaker students are pulled along in their wake, reading and learning, able to make their own sense of things in their own time.

I was immediately uncomfortable with the idea of 'exceptional students' and the way that this classification had implications from the community building objectives of the blogging exercise.

Is it not the case that all my pupils are exceptional?
Shouldn't all of my learners have the opportunity to be opinionated?
Wouldn't it be good if some of the 'exceptional' pupils were 'pulled along in the wake ' of the 'less exceptional'? Wouldn't that be good for their learning experience?
How will the group dynamics be affected if there is an assumption amongst teachers and learners that some learners are exceptional?

On the other hand I can see that within a community of learners , where interaction is being encouraged as a tool for learning, pupils are in the process of learning from one another. Certainly there will be occasions when one pupil or a small group of pupils are lead learners.

It has led me to thinking about how to give every pupil the opportunity to be a lead leader and it has caused me to reflect on the ways in which relationships in a class impact on learning and progress.

Transforming learning from passive to active.

I'm really excited about the potential we have to connect with one another in class using our iPods and I'm currently exploring the different possibilities. I'm working with other staff to ensure the children stay safe and we still have problems to overcome getting connected in school.

So, today because I couldn't wait, we tried using email to connect and engage with our text in literacy. We were looking at plot device and I wrote a number of questions on the board about cliff hangers, dilemmas and resolutions. Whilst I read the text to the pupils they emailed their responses and I used my iPad to mirror the emails onto my white board.

I loved this lesson because very pupil was involved. I had a least one message from each pupil. I loved it because when I read to the class it is usually a problem because it is passive but the email meant that everyone was active. I was able to respond to some of the comments in class and I have since sent an email to every pupil thanking them for their participation and suggesting how they could further develop their contributions in the future.

I'm now researching more effective ways of doing this. I want a live feed where pupils can interact with each other and me as I teach.

http://www.ncs-tech.org/?p=2886

Digital literacy

ICT literacy is the interest, attitude and ability of individuals to appropriately use digital technology and communication tools to access, manage, integrate and evaluate information, construct new knowledge and communicate with others in order to participate effectively in society.

From, PISA Framework for the Assessment of ICT Literacy

The right to an education or the right to learn?

Will Richardson writes in the Huffington Post,

Have we reached the limits of our traditional school system's capacity to deal with the diversity of learners that come into our schools today?

We need to shift our thinking from a goal that focuses on the delivery of something -- a primary education -- to a goal that is about empowering our young people to leverage their innate and natural curiosity to learn whatever and whenever they need to. The goal is about eliminating obstacles to the exercise of this right -- whether the obstacle is the structure and scheduling of the school day, the narrow divisions of subject, the arbitrary separation of learners by age, or others -- rather than supplying or rearranging resources. The shift is extremely powerful...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-richardson/have-schools-reached-limits_b_853848.html

Social Media - our enemy?

I've been a head of year and I know how many problems are caused by malicious use of social media.  But social media is in itself neither good nor bad.

Can social media be used to promote learning and if so how?
How can we use social media and ensure pupils and staff stay safe?
What guidelines can we give to pupils about using social media safely?
Is it possible for us to teach pupils how to use social media well if we can't access social media in school?

http://critical-thinkers.com/2011/10/can-social-media-in-the-classroom-encourage-critical-thinking/

Postscript

Thank you for reading my Blog.
Please leave a comment and let me know about your interests, especially if you use iPods to teach.

All the posts on this Blog have been copied from a previous Blog (hence they all have the same post date)

Able and Gifted

All my pupils are able and gifted and I strive to design learning that meets their individual needs. The iPods help with this because when I'm thinking on the hoof and responding to the needs of pupils as they arising in class I have resources available at the tap of the screen.

This was true yesterday when an academically able pupil was about to start her writing assignment, a non- chronological report, a task that I had planned with the whole class in mind. As soon as I started to explain the task to her I realised how ridiculously easy it was and how many times she would have completed such tasks in previous year group lessons.

We talked together and decided that to support this pupil's interest in fiction with a scary theme she would write a non-fiction report on English folklore. I like the way this work is challenging her to distinguish, in a more subtle way, between fiction writing tasks and non-fiction writing. I also think it will develop further her understanding of the fiction she loves to read now. Ultimately in would be good to see her becoming more open to an increasing number of fiction genres and to start making more mature reading choices.

She is starting with boggarts and a has mission to discover the origin of the boggart and the classic English folk tales about them. She has her Safari web browser to help and I can email her some links to websites that will help her - all made possible with iPod Touch.

What Apple TV did for me!

I hadn't really believed it would work, but yesterday our technician and a fantastically techie colleague set up the new Apple TV to mirror the screen of my iPad to my whiteboard.

I had been using a document camera to show the screen to the class when I was teaching but this is so much better!

It looks better and I can be mobile. I can point the iPad camera at a pupil's work and show it to the rest of the class. I can model the use of different Apps and of course I can easily deliver Keynote and show Pages documents.

Now to discover whether the same thing is possible with the screen of an iPod?

Is an iPod too small for Pages?

The data is purely anecdotal, but 34/34 pupils report that the iPod is not too small for Pages!

I tend to use the iPad in class to model and teach Pages but the pupils are producing some fabulous work and don't seem to be hampered by the size of the device. They are quickly learning how to use the different functions in Pages and are developing new skills fast. The results are slick and professional in appearance and far superior to similar work produced in Word or Publisher.

We all love the templates on offer and I find it useful to match specific success criteria in my lesson to a template. For example I can stipulate that a report must be illustrated with three pictures and direct the pupils to use Visual Report, a template with spaces for three pictures.

Pupils tell me that they love using Pages on the iPod. They don't think the screen is too small and they don't think the key board is too small. Their work completely supports this.

More writing - not less writing

Our iPods are helping us engage more with literacy objectives.

Over the next fortnight all the pupils will be producing two pieces of writing on a Spooky theme. One will be a non-chronological report and the other a piece of descriptive/narrative writing. These will be assessed pieces and pupils will be assessing each other's work using the APP criteria.
So how have we used the iPods to help us achieve our literacy objectives?

Word level learning. We have used the thesaurus (Chambers) on the iPod to improve vocabulary and discuss word choices that create mood and atmosphere. Pupils have used an App called SimpleMinds plus to make mind maps to organise new vocabulary and the Poster template in Pages to select pictures and words to illustrate ideas.

Non-chronological report. We have researched and prepared reports on bats and spiders. We have used Safari to research the topics and selected pictures for the report. Pupils have a choice of word processing or writing the reort by hand. Many have chosen to use Pages to present a report consisting of words and pictures using the Visual Report or Flyer template.

Narrative/descriptive writing. To guide pupils through the process of writing their own chilling tale I have used Book Creator to make an epub document that I have published in iBooks. Pupils can use this to guide them through the writing process.

Poetic devices. Shakespeare, J K Rowling, and other poets have provided our examples and given us inspiration, but the spookiness is all in the way you read the text. The voice recording facility on the iPod gives children a chance to record their own reading and listen to themselves (often for the very first time). Pupils listen to their first recording and decide what they need to do to improve. They then make a second recording after they have adjusted and practised their reading.

The iCloud

I've generate a great deal of excitement in the Learning Pod this week with a celebration of iOS5 Wednesday and an impressive soliloquy about the iCloud. "Where's the iCloud?", asked one little boy as he walked in to the classroom this morning. "Why? It's up there", I replied pointing to a space somewhere in the centre of the room. He seemed satisfied.

I'm hugely excited about the potential we have to connect with one another and extend our learning beyond the four walls of our classroom. We're starting with email but beyond that I have plans for wikis, blogs and Edmodo. I can hardly wait, But we have had some problems to overcome using the iPods on the school network. We are getting closer to a solution and in the mean time I aspire to fluid file sharing and communications and inspire pupils with high expectations of what we will achieve.

30 reasons to use iPods in the classroom

I have been using iPod Touch with 34 year 7 pupils for 30 days and have 30 great things to say about our learning.

Pupils deserve the best technology
Pupils need access to their technology 24/7
Pupils are good at using this technology
iPods work
iPods are durable
iPods are beautiful
The work pupils produce on iPods is beautiful
Pupils know they have a top quality device and they treat it with respect
Pupils can record their own voice
Pupils can take photos
Pupils can take video
Pupils can access the Internet
Pupils can send and receive email
Pupils can write text
Pupils can use pictures
Pupils can make presentations
Pupils can organise themselves with calendars
Pupils can read books
Pupils can record themselves reading books
Pupils can make blogs
Pupils can join forums
Pupils can participate in wikis
Teachers can provide pupils with resources in many different file types
Pupils can message pupils
Pupils can play games to learn
Pupils can play games for fun
Pupils can access content
It's cheaper than text books
It's cheaper than a PC
It's engaging, enjoyable and challenging for pupils and teacher