Friday, March 17, 2017

Getting Set Up


Day 1 of our iPad pilot:

Is this what herding cats feels like?

I'm being dramatic. 😆  Today was the first day students were able to hold and log in to the iPads.  Part of that process included logging in as a "shared user" with an Apple ID and a temporary password (rife with with a mixture of capital letters, lowercase letters, and numbers), and downloading apps from a selection of district-approved choices.

One thing I love about teaching three periods is improving my instruction throughout the day.  For first period, I put together a quick Google Slide to guide students through each step.  After I explained each slide, I gave students a few minutes to follow my directions.  By slide #4, kids were all over the place and some kids went ahead while other kids asked me to go back a few slides.  It was a mess.

For second and third period, I learned my lesson and went through all the slides before letting the students loose on the iPads.  It went a touch better than first period!

During first and third periods, the Director of Technology, himself, came to my classroom to see how it would go setting up the student accounts.  Aside from the chaos in first period, students were able to get logged in with minimal problems.  During second period, when the DoT left, there were some (unconfirmed) wifi issues that prevented a little less than half my class from logging in to their iPads. Of course. Hashtag-Murphy's-Law.

While it turned out to be an annoying setback, I've now been through the set up process roughly 2.5 times, and I'm confident I can get the second period kids on board in no time on Monday.  Wifi-willing, of course.

My biggest challenge now is preparing lessons and "learning work" for students to do using the iPads.  I might take it easy on myself and start at the bottom of the SAMR model and work my way up (or top-down in the illustration below).  Substitution is easier to begin with because I can take existing lessons and transpose them into digital files.  But eventually I want to be at the redefining stage where students are crafting and demonstrating their own learning.


I was thinking today about worksheets and how they get a bum rap.  The worksheets THEMSELVES are not bad.  It's the rote memorization and repetitive yet meaningless "practice" that makes a worksheet bad.  The reason why I was thinking about this is because I gave an assignment a while ago where I put a quote up on the smartboard.  I asked students to get a sheet of paper and explain the quote in a paragraph.  Since the end of the grading period is coming up, I decided to just put the quote at the top of a Google Doc with a bunch of lines, and give one more chance to the students who never turned this assignment in.  Was it a worksheet?  Yes.  Was it making them think?  Yes.  Was it an example of "Redefinition"?  No, but who's to say we can't build on this in the future?

x-illiterate-of-21st-century.jpg

I think a lot of teachers are under the impression that you have to use every bell and whistle that technology has to offer.  NOT TRUE.  If you're a good teacher, you know how to engage your students and get them excited to learn.  The technology helps!  Instead of this worksheet on the quote, I could have put it into Padlet or started a discussion in Google Classroom.  Then students are showing off their thoughts and thinking through their ideas with feedback from peers.  While the "dream" is always to go big and have students create the next self-driving car, there are times when it's enough to just dip your toe in the water.  That is OKAY.

Or at least, that's what I'm telling myself this week :D

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