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.