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.