Skip links

John Hendron

Director of Innovation and Strategy

Archives for May 2014

Drive for the Summer

by ·

Students in our iPad 1:1 program at GES may be interested in learning how to archive some of the content on their iPads for safekeeping over the summer. Over the summer we will be updating all iPads to a new distribution model by Apple and upgrading iPads to iOS 7. At our deployment night this fall, students will need to sign up for an AppleID with their parents to use the iPad for the coming school year.

Files on the iPad are different than what we’re used to on computers. A Pages document, for instance, can only live within the Pages app. There is no easy way to get that data “out,” save for exporting it. Students can, for instance, export a Pages document as a Word file, then opt to open this file in Google Drive. The only files that Apple currently allows to be shared among apps are photos and videos. This tutorial will cover how to move this type of content into Google Drive.

Google Drive is each student’s “virtual hard drive” where content can live off the iPad. Students may access this content through a PC, a Mac, or another mobile device using their Goochland Google credentials. I will show you how to move photos and pictures to your Google Drive account. Parents may wish to consult this guide from Google.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Presenting your Learning

by ·

When I recently visited Randolph Elementary School, I visited a lesson “in action” where students were presenting information they had mastered (presumably for review purposes). This is a very strong instructional approach, and I was pleased to see the students had used video to capture their instructions for their peers on how to solve math problems.

student presentation

During the visit highlighted above, a student had made a mistake in the video, and then told everyone about the mistake and the “correct” way to solve the problem. This reflection on the recorded performance was another excellent sign of strong learning.

Earlier this spring, I began looking at our G21 Framework and areas for improvement. One of the things I wanted to “remove” was the necessity of any expert in the room to fill out the planning form. While it made for a nice sleek form, I wanted to put more of what it takes to develop a good project-based experience for students into the form itself. It would make for a more complex form, but hopefully too would provide teachers a scaffold on which to present an awesome learning experience.

Instead of re-inventing the wheel, my new proposal for G21 adopts the Buck Institute for Education model for project-based learning. The format is more complete at helping teachers plan for the project-based experience. One of the things it encourages, too, is student presentation. While I am not certain that every PBL needs a presentation, and there will be times where the resource of time may prevent a formal presentation, it does not dilute the effectiveness of presenting as an instructional activity. Since 2008 when we started G21, we have used “teaching others” and “communication” as two of our core 12 twenty-first century skills. But we need to remember that these skills do not need to wait for a “G21” to be utilized in our designs for instruction.

I look forward to sharing more in my blog throughout the summer about G21 3.0. On August 7, for our Mission Possible: Operation Engagement professional development day, Bea and I will be offering sessions on the new framework. For now all I will say is consider the new format “smaller” but “more potent!”

Early, Friday one morning…

by ·

It’s not often we meet before school at 7 AM. But today was one of those days…

Teachers

Dr. Geyer and I met with a number of teacher leaders from across the division about needs for digital content connected with the next phases of our one-to-one program. It was a great opportunity for dialog and I appreciate each teacher’s time this morning. We detailed our plans this week to distribute iPads to some of our 1:1 teachers at RES, BES, and GMS; we talked about the use of a learning management system to deliver content to students, and a commitment this summer to begin building a student-facing curriculum. Mr. Joe Beasley and Ms. Krystle Demas shared some of their experiences from GES this year with their iPad pilot in grade 4.

Writing for Others

by ·

Writing, as a pursuit, can be a private pursuit. Writing on a blog is not private, it’s public, but the funny thing is, you may not always feel you have an audience. One person could read your blog post, or 100s, and you don’t really get a reaction unless you have comments turned on and people have something to respond to. Writers also have more established forms of public sharing, through books, magazines, the newspaper, etc. Finally, a lot of writing that takes place in schools is not public nor private, it’s what we might call semi-public. Your teacher and maybe a peer would read your work. Often that writing is to a certain specification, to ensure you are practicing the craft of writing towards improvement.

So, it’s not often that we get to write in school. Illustrate our writing. And, have a guaranteed audience that we know will read our work and give us immediate feedback. But 4th graders at Goochland Elementary recently had this opportunity through a collaborative effort of ITRT Zoe Parrish and classroom teacher Krystle Demas. Demas’ students had the opportunity in class to help Ms. Parrish define what an ebook was, then they were told they would be writing their own! And then they’d have the opportunity to share their ebooks on their iPads with preschool students next door.

Book Example

The books were created with an app we installed as part of our 1:1 pilot called Book Creator, which allows students to create ePub “books” with multiple pages, text, images, and you can even insert video and audio. Students added sound files to each page so that preschool students could be “read to” when the students no longer were there. Ms. Parrish has since loaded the eBook collection on the iPads used at GES specialty center so that the preschool students can continue to enjoy the books created for them by Ms. Demas’ fourth grade students.

eBook Story

The books can be read on a variety of platforms. On the Macintosh, you can use iBooks in OS X Mavericks, and on iOS, you can use iBooks. Access all the books and materials used to deliver the lesson here. Kudos to Ms. Parrish and each and every one of Ms. Demas’ students for their problem solving and application of very creative skills! From what I hear, the preschool students enjoyed the experience immensely.

iTunes U as a Sharing Space for Digital Learning Content Assets with Quality Examples

by ·

When poking around iTunes U and iTunes U K-12, I have found some interesting content. It may have been a college lecture, a video, and even a few PDFs. But my lens of interest is different than that of a classroom teacher, who is likely either looking for personal professional development materials (hey, it’s possible) or resources for use with kids. (If my writing bores you, scroll down to the end for some gems I found.)

The iTunes/iOS ecosystem allows you to point to passive digital content (movies, PDFs, eBooks, audio files) and interactive digital content (iBook textbooks, apps). It’s history started as iTunes U, where the emphasis was on “University.” Big names like the University of California at Berkeley signed on and used the platform as a means to share lectures and digital content. Apple even sold a complete solution to capture, edit, and publish this content. Students who came to college armed with iTunes accounts and iPods were set to grab digital content from the class they just took, or maybe even capture a lecture they missed.

The migration to K-12 content was slow and today when visiting the iTunes Store, iTunes U > K12, we’re provided a list of links to school districts and individual schools who have signed-on to share content. I browsed today with my teacher’s hat on, looking for digital content resources we might use as we expand our 1:1 program. I was flummoxed by the process and wouldn’t blame teachers for not using the site in the way I thought they might.

  1. Content is not indexed with any sort of folksonomy save for the star rating. I cannot search, for as far as I see, for 5-star content, for example.
  2. Browsing is pretty much limited to the collections Apple is promoting on the front page of the “store.” This construct works well for selling new music releases, but it is not efficient or effective at finding specific content such as “high school Spanish 2” lesson ideas, or video podcasts.
  3. Good collections of content are there, but they’ve been constructed by humans with an interest at making finding content easy for end-users such as teachers. One such example is Michigan’s MI Learning page. Virginia, for instance, has long had a page curated by the Virginia Department of Education. But the quality of content, even when you find a well-curated page, can be sketchy.
  4. How can I borrow content across different sources to make my own course? It’s not immediately apparent, although I see others have created courses. Sharing among different content providers isn’t easily supported.
  5. How do I get my own content online? There are a couple of methods, one of which is very technical, involving publishing with RSS feeds, in a separate web space, with a UI that is often not easy to understand and lacks the typical Apple polish or “magic.”
  6. I can add apps to courses, but then that means kids have to pay for them. Yes, unless you’ve prepaid and pre-installed them. I wish Apple had a subscription plan that allowed unlimited access to apps rather than a purchase model. That way, teachers could self-assign apps to students and when payment stopped, the apps would ghost away. Installing apps is many times not a teacher task, but an IT task.
  7. In the course construct, how do I use the technology to interact with my students? There is currently no interactive elements to the course, save for the app which allows students to take notes.

First, I’m not suggesting that we don’t use the resource. After all, I know there are some quality resources to be found. They simply aren’t easy to find. They are also not easy to manipulate.

I have a few recommendations if Apple wants this resource to be helpful to students and teachers in the K-12 space:

  • Getting content into the space needs to be easier. I know the directory model that debuted with podcasting is still in place and works, but it’s not accessible to so many educators.
  • Contributed content needs to come with a Creative Commons license. When you contribute content, it’s there for others to use.
  • All content needs to be tagged with information such as subject area, grade level, level of rigor, modality (listen, watch, read), and maybe even some standards. This information should then be baked into a search feature that’s more robust than a single search bar that looks for game apps, music videos, and hit movies.
  • All content should be easily dragged or dropped into a course construction. I should also be able to do the same using my own learning management system, not just Apple’s.
  • The browsing experience needs to be better. I love the big bold colorful boxes Apple presents like “App Toolkit for Teachers.” But clicking those links shouldn’t just provide access to content that’s been curated recently into a collection. As a science teacher, it should be my landing page to always look for fresh content.
  • Apps. I am not sure they’d ever consider the subscription model I mentioned above. But trying to spend $x of dollars on apps as an instructional technologist (and not a teacher) on content is tedious and frustrating. Teachers are in the best position to choose apps. But they can’t experiment without first spending a lot of money to see what’s out there. They can read reviews, but so many reviews on the store are either not educator-created and online blogs and review portals are fly-by night by well-intentioned teachers but many run out of steam. They also often don’t have the perspective of say an app review in a magazine like Macworld, by naming the “best” app for this or that.
  • Interactivity. The apps Apple has continually update for iOS to “talk” to iTunes such as iTunes U and Podcasts are not bad. They have polish and they work. However, Apple’s not seriously gotten into the learning management business aside for a new container model for content (e.g. courses). I am not sure from a business standpoint, however, they should. There are other experts already doing this, and I’ve attended too many ADE workshops at places like ISTE to know they aren’t content with just iTunes U courses. They’re using Moodle, Schoology, Haiku, and Edmodo with their iPads, Macs, and iPhones. If I were Apple, I’d maybe start over, and make the iPad the most compelling education purchase for a school by bundling a school’s purchase with free access to a first-class LMS. iTunes K-12 would migrate to that web-based system that had tight integration with a first-class app. An iTunes account for students wouldn’t be required (but optional), and instead, a school could choose from different account models (directory sync, Google accounts, etc.) People who are looking at the competition might just say “Wow, if I buy Apple, I’d get this top-tier learning system that no one else gets access to.”

I only mention this not because what exists now is awful, or the only solution. We use Apple tools in conjunction with a lot of other services and sources for content. But I see an opportunity for Apple to solve a problem so many educators are facing now, with the panache and magic that few other companies seem to consistently able to provide. Content in the form of apps, media files (books, video, audio, text) needs to be corralled into an easy to manage and search system of digital assets. These assets then need to be delivered to students. That’s the basic gist. I could go into more detail about how I would do that, but I don’t currently have the time nor desire to publish that at this point.

Now, iTunes U is a sharing space, but it’s one that I personally find difficult to approach with significant depth. I’m challenged on how to get my teachers to share in this space with the technical requirements for publishing. I believe the lack of quality content in the K-10 space is directly correlated with this technical hurdle. In conclusion, I hope my criticism illustrates that a system designed for selling music or loading podcast episodes on an MP3 player isn’t best equipped to help teachers deliver quality instruction with digital resources. We have a vision for what they might be like, and waiting for it is tedious when we already have great technology hardware in our hands.

All that said, I did find some content that may be of interest to our teachers.

As we look at replacing textbooks with digital content, we need a place to park it (sometimes called a learning management system), a medium to access it (say, an iPad), and lessons that describe instructional experiences to use these resources for learning.

One source where we can find a lot of freely available content is iTunes U. That said, it takes some clicking and browsing to find the gems. I found a few worth checking out.

  1. MIT + K12 videos. 99 videos that cover science topics.
  2. The Brain Channel These videos are appropriate for high school students interested in learning more about topics related to neuroscience, medicine, and understanding current research related to the brain.
  3. Khan Academy on Banking and Money. Over 60 videos related to the topics of banking and finance.
  4. University of South Florida Checkout the Lit2Go and other topics produced by USF in conjunction with the Florida Department of Education.
  5. The Virginia Department of Education has a number of series: The Empire of Mali Series, the Virginia Trekkers, Union or Secession: Virginians Decide, Civil War Series, Virginia Studies, Professor Garfield Introduction to Comics,
  6. There is also learning for teachers: Teaching Mathematics – Middle school videos for teachers (not students) on math pedagogy from the Virginia DOE, Radford University Tech Tutorials.
  7. National Archives Collection – collections of information from across all periods of U.S. history.
  8. Apsen Ideas Festival – HS content for social studies

How engaged is engaged?

by ·

Over the weekend I encountered two infographics on Twitter that related to a conversation I had with Mrs. Cantor on Friday about some of the theoretical models we’re looking at to help us with our one-to-one rollout, including SAMR, TPACK, LoTI, HEAT, yadda, yadda, and yadda. On their own these models (on technology integration, twenty-first century learning, engaged instruction, etc.) might look good and make sense. However in a larger context, a real-world one, they do not necessarily play well together. Central in our discussion was the role of engagement, which is, be definition, a big concept. You’ve no doubt heard from a lot of us that we want engaged students in our schools. Dr. Geyer has shared with me that this is a two-part construct: it’s developed through our relationships with students and also the design of instruction to be actually, engaging.

One of the best-known names in the field of student engagement is Phillip Schlechty. Both Dr. Gretz and Dr. Geyer and I have consulted his work before, for instance, when developing the walk-through look-fors for student engagement. But I like even more Schlechty’s distinctions of 5 levels of student engagement.

Levels of Student Engagement

This infographic by Dr. Rios is more comprehensive, and goes further to distinguish what an “engaged classroom” might look like, with a mixture of students at different engagement levels. I like that and know that is realistic. Anytime we attempt to think about “taking a temperature reading” for engagement, it’s one moment in time, and is a result not only of the content of a lesson, the relationship teachers have with students, but also the well-being of a student, their emotional state, and their level of anxiety (or interest in) the current activity. Furthermore, we cannot be fooled that engagement is a behavioral construct alone. To really try and measure engagement might be a foolhardy pursuit, when it is, at heart, a metacognitive state. I do think we can work with students to be mindful of being engaged, to recognize what it’s like when you’re engaged, and try and maximize the opportunities to foster engagement. We can do a lot to develop positive relationships with learners and designing instruction, for me, is all about personalization. I’ll save that for a future post.

But I did like the labels and created the above graphic to make these distinctions more clear. How might we describe the engagement levels of some of our students? Are they interested? Committed? Where is their attention?