One iPad in the classroom tips & ideas (from teacher & student perspective)
A presentation from the recent TeachMeet Woodham where I spoke about ways in which an iPad can be used as a tool to support learning and activities in the classroom.
Tagged with "elearning Archives - Mark Anderson's Blog"
The increasing role of curation in learning & teaching
Curation has always been an important weapon in the arsenal of a student but never before has it been easier to curate, gather, organise and collate information on topics. It is going to change the way in which we teach and the way in which students learn and can access information.
Robin Good is bang on in his detailed article here on the topic when he gives his ten reasons why curation is transforming the education landscape:
- An Overwhelming Abundance of Information Which Begs To Be Organized
- A Growing Number of “Open” Teaching / Learning Content Hubs
- Constantly Changing Information
- Real-World Info Is Not Held Inside Silos
- Fast-Food Info Consumption in Decline
- Job Market Changing – New Skills Needed
- Alternative Certification Systems Emerging
- Teachers Can Curate Their Textbooks
- Educational Marketplace Open to Thousands of Competitors
- Demand for Trusted Guidance
Link: http://www.masternewmedia.org/curation-for-education-and-learning/#ixzz23HvVB897
The management of these curations is becoming increasingly easy too with different providers giving you superb tools to support with this. Not only this, but with students being asked to organise and sort the information that they gather whilst completing tasks linked to their learning, curating the information in to a manageable format is critical to success. Curation is a key skill that students need to have and the providers give you the tools to facilitate that. You have got web clippers, little shortcuts that sit on your toolbar in your browser which make clipping snippets from your browser straight to your curation tool of choice. Many of the providers have multi platform apps too to support you in your ease of curating your tools. Take Pinterest for example, one of the most popular curation tools. You have it on your mobile device, your tablet, your browser and with social media tie ins too with Twitter and Facebook, it’s easy to get information on to your ‘board’ quickly, easily and effectively. Check this Pinterest board on iPads in education for example:
http://pinterest.com/techchef4u/ipad-lessons/
So how does this help students learn?
Well, it depends on what students are ‘learning’ and how you are managing your classroom and how they are either choosing to learn or being asked to learn. In my experience, thinking of the technology use as being cross curricular, having access to a curation tool means that students, wherever they are researching, finding out information, reading given articles or links, even if it’s simply notes (and Evernote provides itself here as a brilliant curation tool too – especially when you tie it in with some automation sites such as IFTTT (ifthisthenthat.com), curation can help a student to sort through the mire of information and put it in to some sense of order.
What are my top curation tools?
What are yours? Would love to hear from you.
MentorMob – perfect for flipping learning?
May 19, 2012 by Mark Anderson 
8 Comments 
Posted under: Cool sites, Everything ICT, Learning & Teaching
8 Comments Posted under: Cool sites, Everything ICT, Learning & Teaching
Many is the time when I’ve been considering ways to flip my classrooms. MentorMob provides an excellent way of doing this. A web 2.0 tool to share ‘learning playlists’ - a bit like micro favourite lists as you might see on delicious, the site allows members of the community to build the learning playlist based upon a specific topic. Where it differs from a posh list of links is that you can build the list with an order of difficulty, ‘beginner’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘advanced’. One of the coolest features of the lot (for teachers) is that you can also add in pop quizzes within the playlist. Adding in learning checks based upon multiple choice or true/false options. Okay, this doesn’t lend itself to higher order / extended abstract responses but it’s not there to completely replace the role of the teacher!
I dipped my toes in to the MentorMob community last week with a playlist aimed at putting all of my resources about the power of Twitter for teachers all in to one place. I linked up all my blog posts, put them in ascending order, added in the great screencasts by @DavidMiller_UK and published.
In the course of a week, the playlist has had a total of more than 10,000 hits. I’ve been receiving stories about how the playlist has been used by schools and teachers all over the world to help teachers looking to join Twitter to support their own professional development. It’s been amazing.
All that to one side, it has really struck me how this tool could be used to construct learning playlists for students to work through prior to their attendance in lessons. What I am going to trial next week is sharing playlists with students prior to their lessons. I am going to ask students to work through the playlist for their homework and then when they attend class, I will build upon and develop their learning, using the flipped model. I think it’s going to work really well. What do you think?
Student workflow on iPad in your lessons
It has been obvious to me for some time now that any learning that is based around use of an iPad should really not be hung on one particular app. That it is about a flow of work, be it individual, or collaborative. Yes, there are some powerful productivity apps that will assist with note taking and organising oneself such as Evernote, OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, Paper, Penultimate, so forth and so on. There are also amazing apps with content such as Solar Walk, Star Walk, The Elements, Wonders of the Universe, etc, but actually – in an environment where students, or groups even, have access to iPads – we want them to be able to demonstrate their understanding and ultimately their learning through the generation of their own content.
With that in mind, I’ve been thinking that really, there are two main tiers of creation based apps for the iPad. There are those that are compilers and those that are the creation tools, i.e. those tools that take all of the various elements that you have created (creation tools) and those that put all of those things in to a combined format (compilation tools).
Once you have this kind of framework, you can then slot the different apps that you have in to those two areas, which will then inform lesson and activity planning which in turn will enable learning to take place.
Compilation tools:
- iMovie
- Avid Studio
- Creative Book Builder
- Book Creator
- iBook Author (if you have a Mac as well)
- Pages
- Keynote
- Explain Everything
- Show Me / Educreations
Creation tools
- PuppetPals HD
- Morfo Booth
- Green Screen Movie FX
- Camera
- Brushes
- Penultimate
- Paper
- Video
- Garageband
- Comic Life
- Half Tone
- Paper
- This list could go on for a very long time – what do you think should be on it?
