Showing posts with label iPad. Show all posts

GR- iBooks Author Hackathon, photo via Steve Dickie

I can't tell you how often I get asked the question: "Why is this called the iBooks Author Hackathon? What does that mean?"  Let's break it down and tell you why.

What is a 'Hackathon'?

an event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers and project managers, collaborate intensively on software projects. Hackathons typically last between a day and a week in length. Some hackathons are intended simply for educational or social purposes, although in many cases the goal is to create usable software. 

If you have read any of my other posts or pages on this blog you will know that I am a big proponent of teacher created (hacked) interactive books made for the iPad using iBooks Author. See our summer project here. 

So, in honor of attending the #NCTM conference this year in Denver and in hopes of inspiring creativity in others and generating feedback (kind critiques) of my own work I am posting two semi-polished interactive books. After downloading them to your iPad please revisit this blog and leave a comment giving feedback to the work in progress. Thanks!

About the Books

bit.ly/ibahack

This was the event I was waiting for at #Macul13. Finally a chance for Steve Dickie (@falconphysics) and I (@anthonydilaura) to tell a wider audience about a large scale cooperative project that will bring educators together to create high quality, interactive content using iBooks Author.

This hour long presentation was an absolute high for me. This is where my passion lies: collaborating with highly motivated, creative educators to create and share digital content that will undoubtedly innovate the way iPad classrooms will function.

Working with Steve and co-presenting this project with him felt like we had been working with one another for years even though it was only our second time of being in the same room. Steve is an incredibly brilliant science teacher that approaches teaching and learning from a very artistic angle. What he brings to this project and to those hacking science content is invaluable.

About the Project

Why: There are literally 100's of reasons perhaps 1000's if you consider the amount of money a district can save and redistribute to support student learning by having teachers create and use these "digital textbooks." But first and foremost is the reason of student learning. What I have experienced and what research backs is that when a curriculum is more personalized and tailored to differentiate for student needs they are more likely to succeed and own the learning. Content delivered in this manner allows the teacher to re-purpose their face to face time. It allows class time to be spent on a deeper exploration and transfer of content.

Why this is so exciting?

Last year my colleague, Shawn Jacob, and I had a fabulous time sharing our school's (Zeeland Public) 1 to 1 iPad journey at Macul12. We named our session "Create, Consume, Collaborate and Communicate- the high school iPad experience." It was awesome and we had a sold out crowd, it was literally standing room only. So we thought 'let's do the sequel.' People will want to know what we learned in year one, what we've changed in year two, what were talking about for year three, and how we are going to sustain the initiative in years to come.


We all know how sequels go, or better yet, don't go. It's not that we suck... at least, I don't think we do. We had our magic trick planned and ready to go (pulled due to lack of audience) who else does a magic trick to start their presentation?

Alright, for all you who "wanted-to-come-but-couldn't-make-it" here is a quick summary.

Year 2- What we're doing differently

Changed Practice- Shawn's example of teaching with an iPad

Over 4000 people from across the midwest will descend upon Cobo Hall in Detroit, MI over the next few days to attend Macul13. Undoubtedly they will hear dynamic keynotes, learn about cool apps, and get a peek into top edtech teachers classrooms. And, while there are a plethora of excellent sessions to attend, I want to recommend a few "must see" sessions for those of us in an iPad teaching and learning environment.

Your students next textbook is written by YOU.

The sessions highlighted below pertain to using iBooks Author to create interactive learning modules (think units of a textbook). All are put on by excellent trainers, most of which, will be apart of this summer's iBooks Author Hackathon--a collaborative effort to create K-12 interactive learning mods. Check these sessions out during Macul, they will get you motivated to hack your students next textbook.

Thursday March 21

Friday March 22

I've always wanted to be featured on iTunes...I'm just not musical

This past week a way cool thing happened to me. Apple listed my Open Geometry Course as one of the "8 Outstanding High School Courses" in the K-12 iTunesU space. I thought I would take a page to reflect on my iTunesU experience and offer some thoughts on how I went about creating my course.

The journey with iTunesU started last school year when a rep from Apple Education contacted me and invited a colleague of mine, Shawn Jacob, and myself out to Cupertino to work with dozens of other educators from around the nation to develop courses for the K-12 iTunesU site.

While there, we worked in content area teams to break up the work and start in on the process of curating content for our courses.  I had several distinct advantages. First, I had just spent a year teaching in a 1:1 iPad environment. Second, I was equipped with tons of great digital content that my colleagues and I had developed over the year. Third, I had flipped my class and was using my own videos, iBooks Author files, and my own online quizzes that were ready to be inserted into iTunesU. Finally, I was already using an LMS to distribute content to students so I had a good idea of how iTunesU could effectively be used, even though it is not a full blown learning management system.

Thoughts on creating your iTunesU course.

2. Create a descriptive course overview and well defined outline. In your course description settings be very clear about your course.  Use keywords that will lead searching students and teachers to you. List content standards, learning targets, guiding questions in the outline, and other descriptors that will give an in-depth understanding of what your course is about. There is nothing more frustrating than opening up a course and not seeing the course outline or having a very vague course description. Add a nice graphic to your course profile...you're on your way.

3. Start small with the idea that you will build your content over the year. Don't feel that you have to have a complete course ready to go at the beginning of the year. Choose to do a course in session as opposed to a self-paced course, this way there will be less pressure on you to post content ahead of schedule.

4. Curate and create. Remember this is a list of resources that you are pointing your subscribers to.  The digital content doesn't have to all be created by you. There is plenty of great content out there on the web already that is licensed under creative commons share-alike code. Be mindful of licensing because you are placing this in your course and if it is public anyone can access it. So, if you're wondering "can I place worksheets from my textbook publisher into my iTunesU course"? I would contact them first and ask. With that said, there are ways to make courses private to your students only and share the class subscription code with them.

5. Add tons of media-rich interactive learning modules. iTunesU course manager allows you to upload links from the web or iTunes/iBooks/App store, documents such as pdfs and keynote, and videos. Students can download video content for viewing offline.  So there are some advantages to uploading the video instead of just pointing at a YouTube link. Apple gives you 20GB's of space so I wouldn't worry too much about running out of room.

6. Create meaningful posts full of descriptive and action oriented words. These posts will show up on student iPads as assignments so it is best to be very clear about what you would like students to do with what you are sending them.  Assignments should start off with action words such as watch, summarize, read, etc. Think about the flow of your posts. Do they make sense for students? Are they organized in a way that is intuitive for students? Do students know what is expected from a particular post? iTunesU is a great place to host and distribute content, however there are no discussion board features for students to post questions and interact.

7. Leverage the note syncing features. Another nice feature of iTunesU is that if you are linking to any books or videos, iTunesU will sync notes from across all these types of posts into one place in iTunesU called the Notes. This makes it really handy for students to go back and review what they have been watching and reading.

Overall iTunesU, while not perfect,  can be a powerful space to help students organize and access their work. If I were to add features to iTunesU I would want to see the ability for teachers and students to communicate, the collaborative and interactive piece of this platform could certainly be developed. I would also like to see the ability to embed widgets (similar to iBooks Author). This would also allow for students to interact with content right from within iTunesU.  Finally, I would love to see the note taking feature support digital inking. While the notes are a great way for students to study, not all information can be captured via text input.

Before the release of iOS6 and the new version of Google Drive there were very options for teacher-student workflow and assignment collection.  Now teachers will no longer need to create special labels and filters for their students to email in their work.

With Google Drives new app teachers and students can create and share documents with a just a few taps. In addition, new features of iOS6 allow learning management systems such as Edmodo to grab files from the camera roll of the iPad right in Safari. In the past we have used Edmodo's app for uploading and Edmodo in safari for downloading.  Ahh!, now Edmodo from Safari will accomplish it all.

Below are two brief tutorials outlining the steps that allow teacher and student workflow to totally exist in the cloud...making the planet yet a greener place and the classroom teacher a happier person.

Submitting student work through Google Drive on the iPad

Submitting student work in Edmodo from Safari on the iPad.

I had no idea what a clinometer was until a few weeks ago when we started talking about an extension project for our 9th grade math students. We started with the idea of measuring angles with a protractor and a scope- essentially a coffee stirring straw. Then it hit us to search the app store and see what they had available. This just highlights the shift in thinking teachers take on in an iPad classroom. Somehow our thinking needs to make this shift from "what materials do I have in my room" to "how can this device and its apps impact student understanding?"

I wish the length between posts could speak cause then I wouldn't have to write this or the next post. Time quickly slips by so I will try to recap because I feel iPads in the class are becoming more exciting to me over the past few months revealing to me their true worth.

A few years ago I studied Classroom Presenter 3 and wrote my masters thesis on tech enhanced interactive lectures. CP3 is an amazing piece of open source software that creates a dynamic interactive student centered conversation in the classroom and in my opinion would make a killer app for the iPad (anyone want to develop it?) The incredible thing about CP3 is that it takes a teacher centered static powerpoint and allows for student input, instant feedback, and an ability to diverge from the linear path of a ppt slide show.

Last year at this time the most technological piece of equipment in my room was an overhead projector. Transparencies, wet erase markers, paper towel scraps all over, and blue fingers from quick licking and erasing all add up to equal a pretty static and one-size-fits-all teacher centered instruction. Students typical class consisted of a warm-up, homework check, a lecture, guided practice and independent work time (if there was time left in the hour). If there were still problems from the book left to complete the students were assigned to finish them at home. As far as I know this was a pretty well accepted and wide practiced approach to learning.

Since then my learning environment has completely changed. iPads are exceptional at delivering content and personalizing instruction. Being absolutely compelled to check out epub creations I have fully dove into creating interactive notes using video lectures created on my laptop, photos edited by skitch, embedded voice prompts recorded in garage band, and active links to sites that will track and record student progress (more to come on interactive text in future posts). I know there is plenty of room for improvement in this content delivery style but when I think about how this can help personalize instruction and give instant student feedback I can't help but to think this is good and the right direction to move in.

This style of delivery is often referred to as flipped instruction. I have lots of thoughts on flipped instruction and personally I have really been excited about this style and what it has allowed for in the learning environment. Here too, there is tons of room for improvement with integrating this approach and making it really effective for my students. However, at this point in it's implementation I can honestly say I will never go back to a static stand and deliver a-one-size-fits-all lecture.

The other day it struck me that students were having instruction personalized on many different levels. Some were working ahead watching and listening to future lectures and practicing problems in sections the rest of the class was not. Some were catching up on lectures not yet watched trying to keep up with the class. Some were reviewing concepts via video they had already viewed and some were getting direct personal face to face just-in-time-teaching from me.

One of the many great ways to transform our learning environment through iPad integration is in the way of gathering real time student artifacts and using it to direct face to face classroom discussions. Real time response systems, clickers, or classroom response systems have been around for awhile now and used to be tied to a remote control type device.

Since then this instantaneous response system has evolved to web-based response systems and iPad compatible apps. Using these sites and apps gives every student a voice in responding to questions and provides teachers real time feedback based directly on student understanding. Imagine how this can transform our face to face time with students?

Consider a few uses: students complete a lecture or video then navigate to a Google form and answer five questions based off the content. The teacher can pull up the spreadsheet of responses and see immediately what conceptions students are forming and can scaffold instruction accordingly.

Or perhaps students are directed to the teachers Poll Everywhere site at the beginning of class for a 5 question warm up based off of the previous day's content. In real time responses are aggregate on the screen giving the teacher data and understanding of what their students are understanding, from here teachers can regroup their class to spend more time with those who need it and allow those who don't need reinforcing the opportunity to work ahead independently.

There are many great ways to collect student artifacts and use them to drive your instructional time Survey Monkey, Question Press, Poll Daddy, and thatquiz are all web-site based tools that offer some sort of free or educational plan. As well there are iPad/iPod apps that provide similar experiences and student data. Try using one of the above sites or find a great app and see what it tells you about your students understanding. Or, even better, show the class results to your students (in a safe way) to allow them to see what they are and are not understanding. Let their conceptions drive your instruction and their learning.

My friend Kip introduced me to the Showme App this summer and right away I feel in love with the ability to capture screen annotations and voice narrations as the user is demonstrating something on their iPad.
Now in class I can demonstrate solving and graphing an inequality using Showme, and instead of not being able to hear or see that explanation again, the captured vodcast can easily be linked or embedded in a classroom website for later viewing and reviewing.
As my familiarity with the app grew I thought "wouldn't it be great for students to use this to help their classmates with difficult problems and demonstrate to me what they truly know." We distributed the free app to students and literally watched and listened as they showed me and their classmates what they knew.
However, an interesting thing happened the other day. Being curious about how I could use the showme website to support student learning I started clicking through some topics. After selecting Learn by Topic > Geometry I was blown away by what I saw. Here it is:


You see up until now students have solved problems for basically two people: themselves and their teacher. But now students are solving problems for an audience of millions. When I projected the website for them the other day and showed them how their works was showing up in just two clicks of the mouse their mouths dropped. They were blown away by the fact that their work was published and freely available for anyone to view and use. I wish I could have take a picture of their faces you could see the sense of ownership and pride in their work take on new meaning.

One week at it and the fog in the classroom is starting to clear. It feels like I have been a completely gang tackled by a bunch of hardware, software, and webware thugs. My desk is a mess with lose papers, software disks, ipads (students and teachers), styli, pens, pencils, cords, chargers... it is evident that I am in a struggle with a digital/analogue identity crisis.

Where are these files? Are they printed? Do they need to be printed?
Can students access this file just using the iPad? Can they edit this file?
Can they organize their iPad so that they know where to find these files?
How do I receive these files back from students with their annotations?
How do I grade digital student artifacts? Do I really want 150 emails today?
Does doing this analogue make better sense for the sake of best practice?

These are just a few of the questions that I find myself asking as I slowly morph from analogue to digital. In an attempt to move to the digital world and connect our learners in a virtual classroom my classes are meeting and communicating on Edmodo- ahhh yes! math class is no longer 58 minutes. In addition, I have built a wiki for just my geometry classes. Biting off more than I can chew is a habit of mine and I don't want to start another project that I don't finish...my wife wouldn't be happy even if it isn't going on the living room wall.

Edmodo is a social network specifically geared for education. It is not as "academic" as Moodle and not as sexy as Facebook...it could almost be seen as an offspring of the two. Some where down inside of me I am scared that students will reject this attempt to meet them in their own world and see through the "trick"of getting them to learn in a place they already are. But I am quite passionate about engaging students on their turf, showing them that they are learning where ever they are and that together we as a community we construct meaning and knowledge about life.

So I feel compelled to push this method of learning...for now. The smallest glimpses of this thing working have been making me giddy... Students will post a question as plain as "what is the homework?" Another student will respond...sometimes with a snide remark like "click on the calendar link above". I smile and say to myself 'look they really do care about one another.' But in reality they are helping, they are directing, they are answering the questions, they are taking ownership...and I am removing myself from the position of sole authority.

Today I posted the links to the first set of Showme tutorials geometry students created for our first quiz review. Student created work, created to help students work... ummm I think this could be good. Check out this students first attempt: