Lisa and I offered 2 sessions in the iPlayground at TCEA this year. The iPlayground was a lot of fun.
In one of our sessions, iPrep 4 Kindergarten, we went rapid-fire through a list of mostly free apps that can be used with young learners to prepare them and reinforce the skills that are needed for kindergarten. It was a lot of fun! Below you will find links to our radio show where we have featured many of the apps (on the list they are underlined) and to our Hot Apps 4 HOTS book in iTunes. Lisa also did a couple of blogs on our iPlaygound sessions as well.
Our other session was Surprisingly Educational Apps. We feature most of the apps we highlighted in the session on our radio show. Take a listen to learn about those great resources.
The entire school flipped! The principal, Greg Green, decided that for their community and school, this would be the best way to go. Chris says that not everyone was convinced at first. Students and teachers alike were timid and insecure, it was uncomfortable to be sure.
Let me back up.
Clintondale is a High School in Clinton Township, Michigan. According to Chris, they are not Title 1, but they have a very high at-risk population, most qualifying for free and reduced lunch. They have school of choice and have many students who travel very far on the bus to and from school daily. Many students are care-takers for their younger siblings in the evenings and may have children of their own to care for. Many have after school jobs that keep them up late at night. They had high failure rates, low test scores, and too many discipline referrals. Something had to change. The principal made the decision to flip the school.
The result is a school that has decreased their discipine referrals by 66%. Test scores went up in all subject areas, “We have reduced the failure rate by 33% in English Language Arts, 31% in Mathematics, 22% in Science and 19% in Social Studies in just one semester.”
According to Chris however, the most rewarding aspect is that he now has a one to one positive academic relationship with EACH ONE of his students. Chris speaks to each one of his students and interacts with them in their learning. He says he used to be the “Sage on the stage” but now likes to see himself more as the “Guide on the side”.
Chris explained what his take on what a flipped classroom is. He describes a “traditional classroom” as about 80% teacher talking and 20% students interacting and talking. This is simply flipped or reversed so that there is 20% teacher and 80% students talking and interacting. Chris says that before the flipping he used his 1 hour of class time ineffectively: the students were going home to complete an assignment without the presence of an expert. He states that he had felt OK in the past about his 5-8 students per class (about 40 students total) that did not pass.
His typical class time now looks like this:
When the students walk in they have a little warm up that they do, something simple. This is done while the kids are walking into class and for the first few moments of class. It is a little review of some kind that reinforces what they had done the day before. Then Chris shows the videos he makes (though he is a proponent that they do not need to be his videos, maybe he shows videos from another class or another school’s flipped classroom that he has found online. Or perhaps he has found a video from YouTube or other source that fits the bill for that day.) The videos are short, maybe 10 minutes at the most. He has the students complete a cloze activity or some other type of simple activity to drive home the key points whilst they watch the videos. All of these video activities are kept by the students in a binder which is essentially their text book. Sometimes the activity is graded, other times he just looks to see if it is being completed, but all the while he is up walking around and interacting with the students.
After the videos, the remaining time is used for questions, activities, simulations, examples or whatever will help his students really understand the concepts. He says that the facts not really what is important. That part is what the videos are all about and the activity that is completed during the presentation or video part. The real meat of the class is in this active/interactive time spent collaborating or creating understanding. If the students do not finish, this can be taken home for homework, but most of the work is completed in class. I did not sense from Chris that there is a lot that is expected of the students outside of the classroom, though they do have some requirements.
The videos are available at home via QR code and URL for students if they wish to watch them prior to class or as a review of materials or if they were absent. The school day is further extended through Twitter, blogs, and other online collaboration groups. The teachers are expected to post on Google Groups at least once per week to which the students are required to email and post. The students do have access to computers before and after school in the library if they do not have Smart phones or other access. The students are also asked to self-assess on the day’s activities.
So this year those 40+ students that used to slip by Chris and fail is currently down to 6 and his goal is to have it be at 0 by the end of the year. I think he can do it, so can YOU. Flip your classroom!
Chris and his colleauges use Camtasia Relay and all of their videos are online, free for you to use with your own classroom. Check out the CNN video of Green being interviewed about his experiences.
The whole reason Lisa and I even started writing the book in the first place was because we had a workshop we wanted to offer at TCEA.
Bloom’s Taxonomy was the basis for the class. We wanted to have teachers think about how they could purposefully use the iPad to deepen instruction vs using the iPad as a consumption device or as a reward tool. Each level of Bloom’s is important and has a valuable place in learning. We really wanted to drive the point home that even though you are at the lower levels of Bloom’s does not mean that you cannot use the device or have your students be creating and producing, using the iPad as a production device. So we created the apptivities to go with each level of Bloom’s.
It was also very important to us to highlight free apps. We know that the VPP process can be difficult for some districts and money is an issue in this economic climate. Additionally, the apps we chose are excellent and for the price, they can’t be beat.
During the class, participants are walked through Understanding A apptivity as a whole group. In small groups, participants found their own way through Creating A. With a partner or individually, participants then worked through a level of their choice. Participants shared their creations during the course. Throughout the course time was given for participants to synthesize information and to think about how some apps though shown in one level of Bloom’s also cold be repurposed with a different apptivity to fit into a variety of other Bloom’s levels. It was a blast! Everyone learned a lot!
Whew! Lisa and I presented 5 times at TCEA this year. We sure did have a good time.
Our first workshop, iBuild iPad Lessons, was offered 2 times. In this session we started with how we find apps and had the participants share out how they find apps. The common threads were TCEA and free app trackers. Lisa and I also like to search for other apps that are offered when we find one we like, Lisa calls that “following the cookie trail.”
We talked about our suggested restrictions we like to set on the devices we have at our campuses and the pros and cons of setting those restrictions. We touched on cautionary apps and drove home the point that teachers need to be aware of everything that is on the app and what can be seen or read on the app. “Preview and Preselect” is the theme here.
Participants got to see some sample student produces and we discussed the various class configurations: whole class, small group and individual or 1:1. We briefly went over giving attribution for images and videos found on the net and the various ways students can turn work in.
There was then discussion about what elements should be included in the lesson plans. This is when the meat of the class began with participants being able to look at lessons on their own and really delve into them and evaluate what they saw.
Participants then had the opportunity to interact with 23 different apps and think about how they could use those apps in their own classrooms.
Lesson plans were then created and shared out.
This session was great. Participants LOVED it and they went away very “appy”.
If you would like to see all the documentation from the class please visit our class information site.
I am fortunate enough to go to TCEA this year and do a few presentations and workshops with my friend and colleague, Lisa Johnson. While we are here doing our own presentations and workshops, we are attending as many presentations as we can.
Carol Finley and Ruth Jungman presented “iPads for Young Learners” at the iPlayground. They highlighed apps and how they can be used in the PreK-1st grade classrooms.
The first idea they shared was to use ABC Magnetic Lite (uppercase letters only) or the paid version of ABC Magnetic Alphabet (includes upper and lower case, numbers, symbols and some pictures) with small groups to do “Making Big Words”. With this activity you have the students make a word, such as CAT. Then say, “Change one letter to change cat to rat”. Students then exchange the C for and R. This goes on for a while then it would go to something harder. “Change one letter to change rat to run”. Students exchange the A to a U. They showed a video of students working with their teacher in a small group on this activity. This is an excellent way to use this app in the classroom and Ruth and Carol really stressed in their presentation that it is really not so much the app itself, but rather how teachers use it with students in an academic way.
They went on to talk about ABC Tracer (check out the free version for a sample). This app demonstrates how to properly write each letter of the alphabet in both upper case and lower case as well as numbers. It models how to begin at the top of the letter and work down. Then it given the learner an opportunity to create the letter themselves by tracing over dotted lines. If the child starts the letter at the bottom it gives a red line instead of a green one and it gives a little squeaky noise to reinforce that it is being done improperly. They suggest doing this app at a station.
Carol said that at the beginning of the year she allowed the students to do free play with Doodle Buddy. Soon she thought, “But what is the purpose?” She began to see ways she could use the app in academic ways. Such as having the students practice their letter writing and having them use the stamps to associate words that begin with that letter. Or using same concept with a color, for example the student writes green then finds pictures of items that are green to stamp on the screen. They discussed how writing with a pencil is a much harder skill than with the finger and that students need to get the feel of the letters with their fingers first and then the writing is much easier with a pencil. And of course, it is much more enticing to do it on the iPad for practice.
One way to get the student to have more choice that Carol has found is with Sock Puppets. With this app Carol has students make scripts about their 8 key character education program. Students took one key to do a script for and then act out a scene that with the puppets. There is choice built in with the app as the students choose their characters, background scenery and props. Given that the students work in pairs, they are inherently collaborating on their project. They talked about the various ways they use the app specifically sequencing and story telling. The students feel there is real purpose to their stories because they share their stories and feel like they are teaching others through their stories. In addition to the 8 key character education program videos the children have also done little spelling activities such as spelling out a word and singing a little song “R-E-D, I can spell red”. The children then evaluate their final videos to decide if they ware worthy of being published or if they need to redo the video or perhaps even rework their story and or script. Carol shares the videos on her teacher web page.
Flip It and Flip It Lite are animation apps that Carol and Ruth say they used at free center time for the most part at the beginning of having the pads. Soon enough they began to see the educational value in the app. They have used this app for students to illustrate the life cycle of a frog, a plant growing from a seed, a person kicking a ball or jumping rope. The animation is quite basic, but it requires that the artist really imagine what the next step of the sequence will be, how the body needs to be placed or what should be erased or added. There is no voice over option and you cannot send the animation from the app anywhere.
Carol then discussed a few management techniques such as having the iPad set to a blank page with only one or two apps in a folder that the students are allowed to use for that center time. She says that it took a bit of time to train the students not to go to other pages or to search for other apps but it is worth the front-loading. She uses a lot of screen shots for evaluation. The students also turn in the iPad for some assignments that a screen shot does not work for.
My favorite anecdote she shared was that she has students who often share out what they created on the iPads during show and tell. How ADROABLE is that?
She ended by giving us some apps that she loves in more of a list format:
Lisa and I wrote a book. It didn’t start out as a book, it started out as a class. We have this Hot Apps 4 HOTS workshop that we were creating for the TCEA conference in Austin. The class goes through the 6 levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy and highlights one or 2 apps for each level, with a little apptivity to go with each app. We had started with these cute task cards that we made that were super cute. Then we got an advanced copy of an app book that was going to be coming out. We looked at each other and both got a sly grin on our faces: Let’s make a book! We did a little research and decided upon Pages to be the platform for creating our project.
We were discouraged by a few of the limitations that the pages epub limits you to such as no video and inline formatting for images specifically, but we were having a good time and learning so much at the same time. We discovered that to have it on iTunes you needed an ISBN number, so there we go getting an ISBN number. Fast forward and we are about to publish. Lisa tells me, “Let’s wait a few days, on Thursday Apple is supposed to do a big reveal, something about text books.” Interesting, Ok, so we wait.
Well, iBookAuthor would have been GREAT! But we went ahead with our little pages version and published. One would think that this was an easy process, but it proved to be a bit challenging for us. Did we not read carefully in our excitement? Did we rush over parts due to our eagerness? Perhaps. In any case, a wee while later it is on iTunes. We are proud.
Here we go again with those surprisingly educational apps. This is so popular and so much fun to do, we just had to do another installment. This week we highlight the following apps: TurboCollage, Photo Measures Lite, Tracing Paper Lite, Skitch, String, Epic Citadel, Video Star, Word Lens, My Secret Diary, Awesome Photo Calendar Lite, QR Code Beamer and explain how they can be used in the classroom in multiple content areas and grade levels.
