Tip of the day - rotation lock

My seniors are preparing presentations, so I have been trying to think about tips that will help them when they hook their iPad up to the projector. When I have been showing things to them I noticed that I am constantly struggling with keeping the iPad level while talking. This trick will help them to focus on what they are saying rather than how they are holding it.

To lock, the rotation, you can access the option through the task bar that opens when you do a four finger swipe up. Once the apps are up, do a one finger swipe to the right. You will see an icon on the left for screen rotation. Tap it to lock or unlock.

My original plan was to show them how to do this through the settings. It was a student in my first period class who showed me this shortcut. I love it when the kids teach me.

Tip of the Day - screenshot

My tip for today was how to take a picture of your iPad screen. If you click the home button and the sleep button at the same time, the iPad will take a photo of the screen and send it to the camera roll. This is turning out to be a great tool for my seniors who are working on multimedia presentations. They are taking pictures of an internet page then opening it it Doodle Buddy to highlight what they want to show in their presentation. They are putting their presentation photos in an album then using it as a slideshow in their presentations. I am so excited to see 3 classes of presentations that don't include a single powerpoint slide!

Collaboration is a tool

One question I keep running into is about students seeing each other's work. People are worried about what will happen when students have access to their peers' work. This should be an advantage, not a concern. With regular access to the internet, students will always have access to others' ideas. This is a reality of the 21st century, and it is our responsibility to prepare students for this reality. We need to learn how to use this to our advantage rather than fighting it.

I am regularly using wiki spaces for students to turn in their work on iPads. They have the ability to see what other students are doing. What I am finding is that they actually don't look unless I tell them to. I designed an activity for my sophomores where they uses online discussion to further their understanding of the novel as we read through the chapters. When we finished the novel, they did a reflection about their own thinking of the novel then searched through the online discussions to research what other students thought. They will be working on a paper that combines their own thinking with that of their peers. This is synthesis of ideas, not cheating. This is actually a much more difficult skill than simply analyzing the novel.

Tip of the Day - close open apps

Today, we talked about how to see which apps are running by using a four finger swipe up or double clicking the home button. If you hold you finger on an app for about 3 seconds in this task bar, they will wiggle and you will see a red button on apps that are running. Touching the red button will allow you to close apps that are running. I explained how hitting the home button only navigates you away from apps, it doesn't close them. Some of the iPads had every single app running, and they were still working great! One last warning I gave them was that on the home screen, the black button that appears when you hold down on an app will delete the program.

demonstrations that actually get heard

For the last few weeks, I have been struggling with my sophomores. They have a very hard time staying focused long enough to hear my explanation or demonstration, then ask me a million questions about what they are supposed to be doing. Today, I did a screen recording for them with their assignment instructions. It was AWESOME. I only had one kid in two classes who still needed to ask for help. Now keeping them on task is a whole other issue...

Tip of the Day - Four Finger Swipe

When you are in app, you can move between open apps with a four finger swipe to the left or right. Lots of OOOOs and AHHHS from my students on this one.

My first screen recording success

Screen recording! I am so excited that this worked! I still have some practicing to do, but it went great! My hope is that kids will watch this when they are ready for it during the class period. They should also be able to pause, do some revision in their essay, and come back to the video.

Tip of the Day

My tip of the day for yesterday was about splitting the keyboard on an iPad. It was so fun to hear the kids say "Woa," "No way," and "Tight." I don't typically hear such enthusiasm when I given them an explanation of symbolism. To split the keyboard, you can swipe with two fingers starting in the middle of the keyboard moving out to the side of the keyboard. This splits the keyboard so that students can type with their thumbs as if they are texting. To bring the keyboard back together, just swipe your finger back together (Picture your fingers as a conductor's). You can also find this feature by holding the bottom right button of the keyboard for 2 seconds.

This is ideal for many of my students who are faster at texting than typing. I keep getting questions from people about typing on the keyboard. Anyone my age or older struggles to see how they could use the keyboard very fast. I think the difference for these kids is that they don't type very fast on a keyboard to begin with. They are just as fast, if not faster, on the iPads, especially with the texting option. Prior to my iPads, I even had some of my seniors typing their essays on their phones then sending them to me via e-mail.

screen recording solution

I am so pleased to report that I found my solution. I had a few minutes to tinker with the program a bit and found a TINY little arrow that I missed my first time around. When you open the window to begin a new screen recording, there is an itty bitty arrow on the right. When you click it, you will find the options including a place to turn on the microphone. I am so excited to play with this some more. Once I get a good one, I will see about posting it here.

screen recording

I tried to put together a screencast yesterday. Some success, some issues.

My seniors are beginning to write their research papers so I wanted to show them how to turn their notes into sentences. I thought that with a screencast, I could show then the steps from a copy/paste of text from a website to a few sentences with a citation. The whole demonstration took me about 10 minutes. I could do it in less time if I tried again, but felt like I hit all of the major points I wanted to remind them about.

Then I replayed it to see how it went. Bummer. I thought that while I was recording the screencast, it was also recording my voice. This was  not the case. I am not sure if Quicktime actually records audio during a screencast. I searched for a while, but could not find anything to get audio with it. I could do an audio only recording, but that isn't really as helpful.

Ultimately, I just did the demonstration live for my students and had the video of the screencast synced to their iPads for them to come back to when they need a refresher. Only one kid per class looked at it yesterday. I am curious if any go back to it today to check it out again.

IOS 5 update

I was surprised when I learned that the iPads did not come with the latest software. I was awarded the grant  at the end of September and that must be when they were boxed up to send to our schools. I was a little nervous about how long they would take to update. When we did the updates on my home computers it seemed to take 20 minutes per device. I was trying not to think about 20 minutes x 30 iPads.

The first one took about 30 minutes because I had to download the software. The rest only took about 10 minutes each. I think that part of why they were fairly quick is that there isn't much on them yet. I basically worked on it every period of the day for 2-3 days. I just kept one syncing while I taught class.

They are working pretty smoothly since the update. I am thrilled to finally have pages for them even though I'm not sure how to have them turn in their work from there yet. For now, I am having them turn in all assignments through wikispaces.

iPads day one

This first day was a bit of a blur. I couldn't wait for them to show up so that I could get started right away. I am in the middle of a research paper with my seniors, so I wanted them to have access to the internet for their research as soon as possible. In our school, computer time can be hard to come by.

The first step was for me to image all 30 in my cart. This took me about 4 hours. It might have been faster if my 2 1/2 year old daughter wasn't running around my classroom at the same time. This process went pretty smoothly since I worked on it immediately after my training on Monday with Dan McCormack from Apple. In the training, we set up the image so all that I had to do was sync them when I got back to my classroom. My concern is that I want to create a new backup image but can't seem to find that option again. I haven't looked to hard yet since it's not a major priority.

The following day was such fun. The kids were SOOOOO excited to finally get to play with them. I had students peering from windows into my classroom and several claim to be new students. I am likely to become a very popular teacher.

I began class with some basic procedures and rules then basically gave them 30 minutes to play. Their only direction was to play with ALL of the apps so that they could become comfortable with the functionality. They often got stuck playing with photo booth for quite some time, but I think that they got a chance to get a lot of stuff out of their system.

The last 15 minutes of class, I gave them a simple assignment to do some work on the wiki page that they have been using for the last month. It was really nice for them to have something to work on that was familiar. I didn't want to add too many new pieces to the class at once.