iPads in the classroom: a review of my 1:1 deployment so far

January 14, 2012 in Mostly Technology, Science Teaching with Technology | 6 comments

iPads as sketchpads

Group drawing of a neuron using iPads

I’m going to return to my roots as an edtech blogger for a moment and recap this past semester’s iPad deployment project, so those of you used to reading my notes about SBG will have to wait for the next post.

Let me begin by saying that this project would not have been possible without Erik, my district’s technology guru and grant writer. He was open to the purchase of iPads, found the money to do so, and has provided advice along the way. An additional word of thanks goes to our student tech interns Kiel and Michael for the initial unboxing and setup of the iPads this past summer. It really has been a group effort to get to the point we are at now.

Begin with the laptop
I’ve been lucky enough to run my classroom with 1:1 laptops for the last couple of years through the use of a dedicated cart of MacBooks. While students normally don’t take the laptops home, every student has an assigned MacBook so that they always logged into the same one every time and so were able to customize their tech setup to their liking. This is a huge point that I’ll be coming back to: students (and teachers too) love to customize their devices. This allows for local and cloud saved files, bookmarks, passwords, and user interface tweaks that collectively define a student’s workflow using the laptops in my class.

Enter the iPad
I had been an iPod Touch user for a while and knew the ins and outs of Apple’s iOS but really hadn’t played with an iPad much outside of an Apple store. Several students had their own iPod or iPhone in class and we managed to do some productive things with them such as web access, calculations, and the occasional reference app like wikipanion. So when Erik mentioned that he might have some funds available to buy a small number of iPads, I was of course interested in trying them out to see what students would be able to do with them. We ended up purchasing several iPad2′s over the summer and I managed to snag one for myself to play with.

Preparing for 1:1 deployment
After tinkering with the iPad for a while over the summer, I saw that the best use of the iPad in a pilot trial would be as a vehicle for sharing resources for my anatomy and physiology class. In particular, I wanted to replace our old mangled anatomy textbooks with an iPad-based text such as that offered through the Inkling app. There were a number of anatomy apps such as Visible Body and VueMe that I wanted to use with students as well, so I pitched the idea to Erik of a pilot iPad trial with my anatomy class, since that seemed the best audience for a limited number of iPads. That’s indeed what we agreed on and later we added a few more iPads to the project by also distributing them to my physics class, for a total of 42 students with iPads, since there was a lot of overlap with students taking both classes.

Setting up the iPads
As I mentioned above, our awesome student interns did the unboxing and initial prep of the iPads, which consisted only of loading a profile that allowed access to the school’s wifi. The rest was up to me. I set up my school MacBookPro as the sync station by creating an iTunes library in a different user account than my normal login with a unique Apple ID. I bombarded Erik with requests for apps from Apple’s Volume Licensing Program and got those installed. I begged our principal to allow the purchase of the anatomy textbook on Inkling and, after some discussion about whether this was a technology or a textbook purchase, he was able to find the money in the budget to buy the texts. The folks at Inkling were really helpful and got me set up with a class set (30) of anatomy texts, each tied to an Inkling account that I manage so that I can reissue the textbooks even after I wipe the iPads at the end of this year.

Distributing the iPads
My philosophy from the beginning of this pilot project was that students should have their own iPad to use at school and at home and that they should be able to take full advantage of the iPad’s capabilities by having full control over their own device. So after preloading the iPads with a set of apps that I thought they might find handy, I had students sign the required paperwork, did a brief orientation session, then turned them loose with their new iPads to see what they could do with them. Most students immediately set up their own Apple accounts on the devices and added new apps and music to their iPads. This started the process of having the students customize the device for their own use, a process that is still ongoing.

iPads as cell nuclei
iPads as cell nuclei in human models of tissue types

What do students do with the iPads?

We’ve been using the iPads for a semester now, and they are just there, quietly a part of what we do, now that the rush of a new toy has faded. Sometimes they replace the MacBook. Sometimes they get replaced by the MacBook.  I wanted to get a better sense of what the iPads were being used for, so I gave students a survey last week about their use of the iPads and here’s what I found:

    1. With few exceptions, students claim that they use their iPad a lot, both at school and at home.
    2. Students claim to spend about equal time on school and non-school related activities on the iPads.
    3. Students’ most used app varies widely among survey participants. Top apps listed were Safari, Pandora, Facebook, Pages, Calculator, Mail, and FaceTime.
    4. Similarly, students favorite app varied widely among survey participants. Some of the favorite apps listed were Safari, Camera, Shakespeare, GarageBand, SimplePhysics, GoodReader, YouTube, The Elements, Angry Birds, Opera Mini, Osmos, and Evernote.
    5. The most interesting responses were to the question of whether the iPad was worth it and would they use one again next year:

I would because I can continually do my school work and do multiple assignments without finding a laptop.

YES IT IS. They’re fun and useful.

yes greatly for the fact of accessibility and learning about tech.

Yes I would because it helps with more than one subject and it is much more convenient  than carrying around a lap top.

yes i would, Sometimes when assignments are due that need to be done the next day, the iPad come in handy to get those done.

DEFINITELY. The iPad has been extremely useful in completing various types of schoolwork.

Yes I would. I would use it because it works fast and is easy to take everywhere.

Yes! i use it all the time! Even though i do mess around on my iPad its still get a lot of work done.

Yes I would use it for school-related work next year. When I do use it for school-related work such as notes and projects it is extremely helpful. Also if I ever have a question that needs to be answered, I can easily get on the iPad and find the answer.

I think the iPad is worth it however a laptop may be more convenient because it allows more programs to be used. For example I don’t have a computer at home at the moment and Most of my school work requires some sort of technology and thats when the iPad comes in handy however I can’t do everything on the iPad.

I am not a technology based person although I was born in the tech-boom era. I appreciate technology to an extent with its resources, but I believe that some things should not be “turned into an app”. For me, I would stick to using the laptops. iPads are higher quality, and more notorious, but I find their powers to be limited. They are difficult to keep clean as well. It is a great idea though, for saving space. That’s coming from a traditionalist. I’d say keep the iPads for future use, just not for me.

Not any more than I do now.  I don’t like Apple products, they’re overpriced and overhyped.  Not to mention the nonsensical programs you have to download just to use an Apple product.  They aren’t worth the trouble.

YES!  I use Pages all the time to take notes for all of my classes and to type up reports.  I also use it to connect to things like Edmodo and GoogleDocs whenever i need. The IPads come in handy many times during the day!

Some takeaways from the survey

Given their own personal iPad and the freedom to modify it, high school students use the iPad in a variety of different ways and for multiple courses throughout the school day. Nearly every student had their own beliefs as to which apps were the best or the ones they used most. Games are on the iPads, but so are a variety of tools for school-related tasks and the students who took this survey believe that they can find a balance between the two. The overwhelming majority of students would use them in coursework again next year if given the chance, which was an interesting result given that most students taking the survey were seniors who are unlikely to get an iPad from me next year since they’ll have graduated.

In conclusion, after a semester with 1:1 iPads, the reviews from students are very positive on the whole, although not every student chooses the iPad as their primary learning tool. iPads seem to allow students to personalize the technology that they use to navigate the requirements of their different courses. Furthermore, by allowing students to take the iPads home, both students and their families have been able to use the devices for a variety of tasks that they might not otherwise have been able to accomplish. Efforts are underway at our school to integrate the iPad into other disciplines besides science and to increase the number of iPads that we can put into the hands of students.

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Standards-based grading support group: Teachers Teaching on the Prairie podcast

December 10, 2011 in Assessment and Grades | No comments

I was recently invited by my colleague Kelly Jo Smith to participate in a podcast discussion about standards-based grades. There has been enough of a stir about SBG at our school lately that she thought it would be good to get several teachers who are trying it out to go “on tape” discussing our experiences of SBG.

I was joined by Justin Miller (art teacher), Eva Rodriguez (Spanish teacher), and Kelly Jo (language arts and drama teacher) for a great conversation that I managed to record and push out as a podcast. It really was a very affirming conversation and I think we all came away feeling a little less alone in our struggles with reforming our grading systems to reflect learning rather than completion.

I’m not a huge fan of podcasts due to my short attention span, but I think this sort of extended conversation about a topic is exactly why podcasting was invented. If you are at all interested in how teachers in several disciplines are using standards-based grades then you might want to give it a listen.

 

 

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Student ePortfolios in the High School Science Classroom: Q & A

November 14, 2011 in Assessment and Grades, Blogging | 8 comments

Q: What’s an ePortfolio?
A: Let me start by saying that, like most of what I use in my teaching, I didn’t invent ePortfolios and I can’t answer for everyone since ePortfolios mean different things to different people. But I will define an ePortfolio as an online space that gets used to collect and showcase evidence of individual student learning.

Q: You mean its like a blog?
A: Sorta. Blogs certainly can be used to show what a student has learned. In fact, thats how my classes operated last year, with student work nearly exclusively being posted to personal blogs. But an ePortfolio is different from a student’s blog. A blog is organized chronologically by date of publication, but an ePortfolio is organized by skill and content area standards and represents an attempt to prove that those standards have been met.

Q: Why add another site for students to manage? Isn’t a blog enough work?
A: What I found with the blogs was that students worked incredibly hard and produced amazing pieces of work but often couldn’t tell me which standards their posts met. As long as I was the only one evaluating their work, the standards for the class mattered only to me. Self-reflection of learning was really missing.

Q: So how does creating an ePortfolio lead to more self-reflection?
A: For starters, students have to look through all the blog posts that they have written so far and select which ones will go into their portfolio and on which pages to include them. This leads naturally to a discovery of which standards have a lot of evidence of mastery and which have less. Furthermore, there is a page within the portfolio that is for evidence of self-reflection, either in blog posts or as demonstrated while completing the portfolio. Many students used this page to assess the current status of their learning as shown by the portfolio.

Q: You mention pages in the ePortfolio and have many references to “standards.” How are the two related?
A: Each skill and content area standard gets its own page in the portfolio, which will vary with the content of each course.

Q: How did you decide which skill and content area standards to use for the pages in the portfolios?
A: The short answer is that those are the standards that I piloted last year as I implemented standards-based grading in each of my anatomy, biology, and chemistry courses. All of my science courses share the same set of 9 major skill standards, the first of which is broken down into specific content areas for each course. The common skill standards are those things that usually get called science process skills: graph interpretation, experimental design, lab and research skills, to name a few. The content-specific standards were derived from the Colorado Community College standard competencies for each individual course.

Q: These portfolio pages you keep referring to, where are they, exactly?
A: In a student-owned Google Site.

Q: ?
A: Early in the school year, I built a template site for each subject area course in Google Sites and then shared those templates to our district’s GoogleApps domain. Students could then go into Google Sites and create their own portfolio site from the template that I had created. Since the template had pages set up for each skill and content area standard, each student portfolio site also had these pages set up automatically as well. All students have to do is edit each page of the portfolio to include their blog posts, reflections, and other artifacts such as test scores that demonstrate mastery of that particular standard.

Q: So when do I get to see one of these ePortfolios?
A: The ePortfolios live within our schools’ GoogleApps domain and are mostly set to be visible only within our district at the moment. However, a few seniors have hit on the idea that colleges and scholarship providers might be interested in their work, and so have made their portfolios publicly visible. Here are a few links that I think will work:
Steven’s A&P ePortfolio
Audie’s A&P ePortfolio
Katrina’s A&P ePortfolio
Steven’s Chemistry ePortfolio
I hope to convince more students to make their portfolios public and will add links as they do so.

Q: Ok, I’m interested enough to want to know more. Got any references for me?
A: Here are a couple links to get you started:
Levels of eportfolio development in k-12 schools
Creating student portfolios with Google Sites

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A triumph of math

October 23, 2011 in Physics | 2 comments

After much scribbling on whiteboards, iPads, calculators, restaurant napkins, and most anything else you can think of scribbling on, the math was done. Theory. Numbers on a screen or slip of paper. Are they the right numbers? How will we know?

Build it. Cut the lumber according to the calculations. And they did. The math was right.

20111023-193001.jpg To be continued….

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Managing student websites with Pearltrees

October 14, 2011 in Blogging, Mostly Technology | No comments

Pearltrees screenshot-anatomy class portfolios

This is just a quick post to share a neat tool for keeping track of student websites called Pearltrees. I ran across this article recently and thought this might be useful for organizing all of my student sites that I need to keep track of. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I keep track of individual student blogs using RSS feeds. But there are many times that I want a simple way to pull up a student website to show to a student, administrator, or parent, and an RSS feed reader is ok, but clunky for that purpose. I’ve bookmarked my student blogs, too, of course, which works but lacks any style or graphic organization.

Perhaps all the iOS and app downloading frenzy that went on this week and the resulting extra time spent on the iPad had something to do with it. Or maybe it was the fact that our 1st quarter grading period ends next week and I’ll need to be evaluating all of my students portfolios. Either way, the thought of a graphical interface that could easily locate student websites seemed really appealing to me so when I saw the article on Pearltrees and it’s new iPad app, I checked it out.

Their app is simple to use and makes use of a bookmarklet to capture any site you choose. As you might see in the screenshot above, I now have each class in its own “pearl” and can easily find individual student portfolios in each class. It’s also amazingly easy to flip from one student site to the next within a class so that should speed up the evaluation process. At least it will make it a little more aesthetically pleasing. Eye candy ain’t all bad.

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A fine balance

September 30, 2011 in Assessment and Grades, Learning Environments, Physics | 1 comment

20110930-171016.jpg

20110930-171504.jpg

It’s been another phenomenal week in my physics class. We’ve got a definite groove going on in there that is about as student-centered as I can make it. We’ve got several different projects going on at once, still, but this week saw the successful completion and testing of our potato launcher (“its not a potato gun, its a potato accelerator”). Let’s just say that at this point it launches so far we’re moving it to a more appropriate firing range. Yay for living in a rural area with an empty lot behind the school.

Here’s my continuing dilemma, though: I’m constantly struggling not to over-teach these kids by jumping in to analyze what they are doing in terms of the physical principles involved. I regularly find myself almost launching into lecture mode once some major concept is demonstrated in one of their projects. Mostly, I think a hands-off approach on my part will pay off in the end with greater student ownership of their education. On the other hand, part of me feels like I’m somehow doing them a disservice if I don’t prepare them for the kind of physics class that they’ll encounter in college, with problem sets and various levels of plug-and-chug formulas.

I’ve been reading several posts lately with the message of “stop teaching so much, already!” and I tend to agree. I spoke with several parents at our recent parent night (reported on here with pics of one of our hovercrafts) and they didn’t seem to have any issues with the project-intensive class format, so I think I’m teaching enough as far as they are concerned. There’s just this little old science teacher voice in my head that says we’re having too much fun at this for it to really be a physics class.

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Student-designed physics class: barely controlled chaos for the win

September 18, 2011 in Mostly Science, Physics | 1 comment

The experimental experiential student-designed entity that is my physics class is up and running for the year. We’re about three weeks in now (one of which was homecoming week, thank you very much) and we have some sort of structure to the class, but not much, or at least not as much as I’m used to (yes, I used to lecture a lot not too long ago).  The 18 students (was originally only supposed to be 8!) started off the year by getting a feel for what they might want to learn about this year in their physics class and they started making wish lists for major projects to undertake during the year. So far they’ve set up their own wiki for collecting ideas about what they should probably learn about this year for those going on to Colorado School of Mines or some other technical field. They mostly landed on the AP Physics standards, just because they are so accessible and well documented, but they borrowed some topic lists from some of the physics teachers I keep track of too. They divided themselves up into six groups to tackle what they thought would be the six major units for the year (Mechanics, Electricity and Magnetism, Waves and Optics, Thermophysics, Fluid Dynamics, and Atomic/Nuclear Physics) then did some research into what those different topics were about. At the moment, the wiki is a work in progress, as it should be, but we’ll probably keep referring back to it and adding to it all year.

Currently, we’re multitasking in a big way as a class. One group of students built our prototype hovercraft and did some pretty extensive testing of it in the halls last Friday. There’s a pretty extensive collection of videos of the event being produced at the moment (Thanks Kiel!) that will be linked here and/or on the wiki shortly. Another group (and by group I mean those people working on it that particular day, our groups are pretty fluid) is putting together the specs for a trebuchet that they want to build around Halloween to help dispose of some of the excess pumpkins in our valley (I help out by blowing some up in Chemistry class, but there’s always a surplus around here). Other students have been tinkering with the Vernier Video Physics app and other motion-capturing software so we can gear up for analyzing the motion of anything we build and/or videos and video games we play. Oh, and another set of kids is starting to learn how to set up a wifi signal-bouncing network across our town.

Okay, so there’s an awful lot going on. But how do I grade such a class? That’s my job, apparently. I gave the class the option of writing the set of standards that would go into the gradebook, but they were strangely more interested in building stuff and getting ideas from YouTube and Instructables than in dealing with writing a grading system. They told me to deal with that part of the class. I’m currently putting together some sort of standards document, but at least a part of me thinks I’m going to merely use it to keep them on track this year and not as some massive spreadsheet for grading them SBG-style. The verdict is still out on that one. If you have ideas on how to assess individual kids in a chaotic (yet fun!) group-project-oriented physics class, I’d be happy to hear from you.

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How I manage lots of students’ blogs: RSS feeds and Google Reader

August 28, 2011 in Blogging | 2 comments

This was written a while ago for a fellow teacher over at Classroom 2.0 but I thought I’d repost it here because I’m not sure it’s public in its original form and some folks have been asking about managing student blogs:

________

Thanks for the kind comments about my blog! I’m glad its given you some ideas to try.

Forgive me if you know some of this stuff already, but I’ll try to start at a basic level. Also, know that there are lots of resources out there to check out, and I’m sure that other folks do a much better job of explaining this stuff than I do, but here goes.

First off, most any blog has within it the capability to be subscribed to using an RSS (really simple syndication) protocol. RSS “feeds” basically send out a message to “subscribers” whenever the author posts something new to the blog. It is not too terribly hard then to find your favorite blog, subscribe to it, and then be notified of new additions to the blog. These are the three steps that you will want to do with your students’ blogs.

The way I did it went like this:

1. At the beginning of the year, students set up Google accounts and sign up for their own blog at Blogger.com (I think the name will change to just Google Blogs in a while). Optionally, some students chose to create their blog at WordPress.com
2. Using Edmodo, students post links to their new blog so everyone in the class (and I) could have an easy link to click on to find their blog.
3. Using my own Google account, I signed in to Google Reader, which is simply a web service that subscribes to the RSS feeds for blogs. Some browsers, like Safari, can act as RSS readers, too, but I never was really impressed by the experience of using the built-in RSS reader in Safari and instead used Safari to access Google Reader.
4. I visited each blog and looked for the link to subscribe to the blog. In Blogger this is sometimes called the Atom feed, but it does the same thing as RSS. (There also are some plugins for browsers that will put an RSS icon next to the blog’s address that you just click on to subscribe.)
5. Once you click on a blog’s link to subscribe, it should pull up a dialog confirming that you want to subscribe to the blog’s feed. You might need to tweak a setting in your browser to make sure RSS feeds are handled by Google Reader if the feed doesn’t get put there.
6. After you confirm the subscription, the blog should show up in your Reader. You can organize Reader by using folders. My organization was to have a folder for each class period and organize each folder by student first names, but you can do whatever seems best for you.
7. As students write in their blogs and hit the publish button when finished, you will see the name of their blog in Reader change to a bold font to show that there is an unread post detected. Click on their blog to see which posts that you have not read yet. If you click on the title of the post in Reader it will take you to a simplified version of the post that is mostly text. There is also usually a link to the actual post if there are some graphics missing or you want to see more of the eye-candy that students put on their blog.
8. Generally, I kept a window of Google Reader open continuously all year to keep an eye on when students published to their blogs.
9. I also use the iPod/iPad app “Reeder” to keep track of my blog subscriptions, including student blogs, although I still do most of my reading on my Mac in Google Reader. There’s a Mac version of Reeder now too, although I haven’t felt the need to buy it.
10. Lastly, you can make your experience of Reeder a little more interesting with some simple browser extensions. I know Safari has several like “Better Google Reader” and Firefox and Chrome probably do too. These add some bells and whistles like inline previews (so you don’t have to leave Reader to see the “real” post) or colorized lists.
I would start off by using Reader to subscribe to some of your favorite blogs by educators and get a feel for how to use it that way, before you launch into using it with students.  That way you can later teach them how to set it up to subscribe to their favorite blogs too!

Good luck! Let me know if you have any more questions.

-Chris

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Blogs, portfolios, and feedback (oh my!)

August 17, 2011 in Assessment and Grades, Blogging | 2 comments

This is a work in progress, as most of my stuff is, but here is my Assessment Philosophy for the 2011-2012 school year that I’ll be sharing with students and their parents.

Some key new features I’m trying:

  • student blog posts will receive only feedback, not grades
  • the spreadsheets I used last year will be editable by both myself and the student for each to add comments
  • students will create portfolios of their work by selecting and analyzing their best evidence of learning
  • portfolios will be organized and assessed using standards-based criteria
  • the only letter grades used will be assigned when portfolios are assessed at the ends of grading periods

Some things still to work out:

Feel free to leave suggestions for improvements/implementation in the comments and please snag a copy for yourself if you want to borrow any of it.

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On Developing (or not) a Student-Designed Physics Course

August 5, 2011 in Curriculum, Learning Environments, Mostly Science | 6 comments

I’ve been putting off this post for a while, even though some of these ideas have been kicking around in my head all summer. I suppose I haven’t wanted to have one of my pet ideas shot down by wiser heads. But now that the school year is almost upon us, and I’m looking over yet another Edge, it feels like time to throw this one out there.

At the rural high school I teach at, we have often offered an upper level physics course, one that goes beyond what students do in their freshman level Physical Science, but it rarely happens due to lack of student interest. That appears to have changed this year and, yes, yours truly has been tagged as the Physics teacher.

I’ve taught physics before, both as a one semester introductory course and as a full-year elective, so I’ve got some ideas about how to run the course. I could trot out one of my old syllabi, change the dates, maybe update an URL or two, and go about the business of surviving yet another new(ish) prep. But I’m not going to do it that way.

I’m going to go in the first day of class without a syllabus, pacing guide, or even a web page to tell students about the class. Its going to be their class and they’ll help decide what the course looks like.

This means that after an introductory activity or two, we’ll sit down together and decide what we want to do this year as a physics class. We’ll throw around our favorite topics in physics and get a sense of where our interests lie. We’ll brainstorm some major projects that we want to build (community WiFi, catapults, and a hovercraft for starters). And then we will crack open the physics textbook and see what other topics we missed that we think we ought to know before the year is over. Only then will we break out some shared Docs and write our syllabus for the year, complete with topics, projects, and how we’ll determine final grades.

For the SBG’ers out there who are interested in my list of physics standards that I’m going to assess, sorry, my students haven’t written them yet. But we will. Together.

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