Garageband on the iPad

The assignment was simple and something that I had done for the past eight years.  The students (in groups) choose what they believe to be the top five amendments.  They must also explain why their amendments are in the top five and what the nation would be like without those amendments. 

In years past they've made posters, powerpoints, prezis, and things of that nature.  Last year (my first 1:1 year) I decided to take a different route and let the kids make podcasts.  The website I chose was podomatic.com.  I had one master account the students uploaded to but could only work one at a time when recording and uploading. 

This year my department lobbied to purchase a few iPads/iPods and I made the decision to utilize them on this assignment.  Garageband is a $4.99 app and well worth it for use in the classroom.  With the iPads and Garageband students were able to completely record, edit, produce, and upload their podcasts to iTunes which they could then pull into my iWeb website.   Multiple students were able to work at the same time and uploading took seconds.  Also, students were able to make their own original music to go with their podcasts using the smart instruments. 

Pros

• Very user-friendly for the students and the learning curve is very short.
• No disk space to worry about.
• No need to worry about copyrighted music (students make their own content).
• Easily manageable by the classroom teacher.  
• Excellent for schools/teachers that have embraced BYOD.

Cons

• You still need a main computer to pull it into your website.  
• As far as I know you cannot upload a podcast image to Garageband.

Overall I was very happy with how this assignment turned out and plan on having the students podcast weekly wrap-ups starting next semester.  If you would like to listen for yourself how things went for my students click here to view our class podcast page.  Enjoy!

Diigo Teacher Console

Did you ever try a tool or website, not necessarily fall in love with it, and then come back a few years later to find that not only have massive improvements occurred but that you couldn't wait to implement it in your class?  That is obviously where I stand today with the social bookmarking tool Diigo. 

With Diigo you can create groups, bookmark websites, share them to the group, and even highlight and annotate the websites.  You can literally bookmark an article or website and have a threaded discussion that is accessible 24-7.  This is useful for current events, primary documents, webquests, or anything you would want to highlight and comment on for your students to see or ask questions themeselves. 

I had originally gotten away from Diigo because when I created a group members didn't always see the highlights, sticky notes, or could see them but not comment.  It was very frustrating and I spent more time troubleshooting than I did anything else; which is your worst nightmare in a 1:1 environment. 

Recently I saw something come across twitter that talked about a teacher console for Diigo.  I signed up just to try it out and the results were awesome.  With the teacher console the teacher can create student accounts (massively if you want to upload a .csv file) and manage them, and email is optional.  The students simply go to diigo and log in with the name and password you gave them and install the diigo toolbar.  By they way, for you iPad folks there is a Diigo browser that you can get from the App store for free!

Once I did this my students could see everything!  Highlights, comments, access, everything was available and visible to my students.  Students don't read enough and with this tool it enables me to upload content from anywhere and discuss the material in real time from any place.  As a social studies teacher it has improved my classroom for the better and brought the news of the world to my students' screen.  Another great side benefit, no ordering highlighters and printing copies!

Here is the link to sign up for a teacher account, try it out and enjoy!:  http://www.diigo.com/education

The Organized Chaos of PBL

For a few years now I have embraced project based learning as a way to foster greater engagement and understanding of my classroom content.  Fortunately I am not the only teacher in my district that has done so, and now having students that have been exposed to this environment for a few years has led to some great results. 

Bottom line, if you want to get the absolute best results from your students, let them choose how to give it to you!!!!  Usually when I assign a new project I allow the students to cover the content in a variety of ways, if there is one they can think of that I haven't and it has value I allow them to do it.  In the last ten days I've had so many students come out of their shell and for the first time and I am seeing what they are truly capable of.

To really get into this method you must be able to let go of the idea of a teacher focused class and embrace the idea of the teacher as a project overseer/manager.   Instead of delivering the content you help them figure out where they can find it and give some ideas of how they can assimilate it and demonstrate understanding.  Making website, videos, avatars, collaborative presentations are all great mediums for this.  Also, allowing the students to be more creative and being flexible on time cuts down a great deal of information regurgitation. 

Were there projects that were less than stellar?  Absolutely!  Are there projects that have yet to be turned in?  Aren't there always.  These are the same kids that never turned in their worksheets either. 

In public education we often forget about the students in the middle.  The struggling students get special attention and your high achievers would do well even if instructed by a well trained monkey.  However, we often let middle of the road students sink or swim without as much thought for a myriad of reasons.  It is my contention that if you want to get the most out of these students you should try at least a few PBL assignments and it's important that you let the students choose how to demonstrate their learning.  I'm not an expert, but I know that I was a much happier teacher by the end of this past week. 

For some examples of what I'm talking about please check out my student project wiki located here.

Skype in the Classroom

Normally if my phone goes off at 1:30 AM it is because someone has died or needs a ride home.  Fortunately for me this was not the case.  I opened my eyes just long enough to peer at my iPhone and see that I had gotten a reply from a project owner on Skype in the Classroom that I had signed up for earlier that day.

The other teacher a world away responded very positively to me and was excited to do a cultural exchange between my class and his located on the other side of the planet in Japan.

This is not the first time I'll be using skype in the classroom but it is by far the farthest away my class has traveled.  When I told my period four class today that we would be doing this (actually I let them read the email) they were very excited and curious about how we would do this and what we would say.

I explained to them that we would be making a video about their experience as a student in our high school and asking students in Japan about their experiences.  I asked for student volunteers to help organize this project and several leaped at the opportunity.  Also, I spoke with a few students after class about helping out with the tech side of things.

Needless to say I'm very excited about this opportunity to learn about another culture and put some of our new classroom toys into action (iPads, iMovie, etc).  What makes it most exciting is how eager the students were do this even though they knew if was not for points.

By the end of the period we had even more ideas for what we could do with the other class.  Check back to see how it all turns out!

Struggling to Stay 1:1

If you're teaching anywhere in a district like mine your district has been touched by the not so invisible hand of budget cuts.  That can mean many different things depending on what you teach, grade level, or where you teach.  We could debate until we're blue in the face as to why this is happening, but it would change very little.  Art supplies get cut for the art dept, calculators don't get replaced, gym class will be played with flat basketballs everyone has to take a bite of this sandwich I understand.

One thing everyone gets no matter what you teach is bigger class sizes.  People retired and they were not replaced leaving you with an excess of students.  For me this means in a class that four out of the seven classes that I teach are no longer one to one.   What is a 1:1 teacher to do?  Give up?  Get out the worksheets and vocab lists?  Those are loser answers, necessity is the mother of all invention.  Here are some of the things I've done to deal with the situation.  Any other input would be appreciated.

Bring in some of your old personal laptops/desktops:
I only have one old laptop, so I brought it in.  Students cannot save to their network drive, but as I told them "You're a big boy/girl, you should have a dropbox account and a google apps account."  Students are not really limited as to what they can do on a non-school machine due to the cloud.

Personal Devices:
This is bound to be the most controversial option for some people (esp. if you are in administration).  Should a student ever use a personal device in my room for educational purposes I would simply make sure that they could create content (slideshows, movies, documents etc) but save the uploading for later so they are not on the school network.

Differentiate:
Some students either do not want to or do not have the ability to produce work and demonstrate knowledge in a 21st century classroom, but obviously can still demonstrate mastery of a subject.  Let them do it however they want!  Lets face it, some students are more comfortable answering questions at the end of the chapter on a piece of paper.  However, (and this is where I used to struggle) make sure to assess them in that manner rather than PBL.

I don't have all of the answers but these are just some of the things I've done.  As I said before, any help would be appreciated.  Maybe somewhere in the not to distant future I will no longer have to create a post like this, but until then...improvise.

Backchannel in the Classroom

I've done it a million times, "Here are the questions, they go along with the video, and yes they are in order."   What do I end up with?  Most students complete the questions, but it's just repeated back from the video or copied off of their neighbor with little to no thought at all.

Last year I used CoverItLive as a way for students that weren't participating in our skype debates with other classes to contribute their part to the debate as well.  This year I decided rather than passing out question sheets with every video I would backchannel discuss instead. 

The first day it did not go so well.  To be honest most students did not remember their Edmodo password and could not get to the backchannel.  Once everyone was in however things seemed to go well.  There was lively discussion and for the most part everyone was able to contribute something to the conversation.  Some students did have issues following the chat and the video at the same time. 

Overall it went pretty well.  I was able to monitor the students and moderate the discussion while walking around with my iPod touch using the FREE CoveritLive app.  Being able to approve comments made keeping people on task much easier.  The useless comments almost vanished day two.  I would highly suggest any 1:1 class try this out! 

Hitting the Ground Running

As a Social Studies teacher that like to focus on integrating technology into my classrooms and lessons I thought it might be a nice idea to share my experiences in implementing different tools/methods in my classroom.  Many of them I've used before, but it's a new year and a new group of students they probably have never been in a 1:1 environment before. 

The first tool I utilized this year was Edmodo.  This is an excellent microblogging tool designed for schools that I've used for the last three-four years.  It is great because it puts students in a familiar "facebook" like environment but adds and educational twist.  Everything is under the control of the teacher and even has options to include parents.  It would be safe to say that Edmodo is the command center for everything I do in my classroom.  I used Edmodo to embed a Google Form survey for the students to take about their learning experiences. 

So far the students have been enjoying using Edmodo.  It's not something we use everyday but at least every other day.  I'm also getting more questions about using it, "Can we use Edmodo for this project?" "Can you set us up in small groups for that project?"  All questions I happily say, "yes" to. 

Hopefully the year continues to go positive and the students continue to be receptive of what I do and how I do it.  Here's to a great start!