Hold My Chalk

Somehow you managed to scrape together enough iPads to put in your classrooms. All of your students have access to them one way or another, but all they want to do is play games. Problem, right?  Wrong!  If all your students want. To do is play games, give the permission to do it. Turn it into a learning experience. If your kids can't stay out of Angry Birds , turn it into a science experiment.   Not sure how?  Here is one way to do it.   Have the students make predictions about the angle, amount of force, etc., to get the best results.   Keep track of the results in some note taking app or whiteboard app. If you use one of the whiteboard apps, students could take screenshots of their experimentation and write n the results.  Which way would you rather learn physics?  By reading about it in a book or creating your own experiment?  I think most would rather design their own experiment. What kind of results or data do you want to get from your students from this?   How easy would it ...

QR codes have been around for several years now. A few years ago I was exposed to the potential for incorporation into my classroom activities and began to search for ways to use them. This proved to be a challenge simply because there were not enough devices my students could use to read the codes. So i resorted to using them mostly when I gave presentations at workshops.  I felt very limited with my use of QR codes then because when I do a presentation I like to be able to tell people first hand all the great ways they can use something. I don't like to say you can use a tool without ever having used it in that way myself. In my current job I find myself doing that more and more. A big part of my job is and will be discovering new tools and assisting teachers with developing lessons centered around the use of that tool.   Recently more people in our district have realized the potential of QR codes for classroom use.  Even more recently our administrators began to see th...

As part of our deployment of 1000 iPads we were advised by Apple that to run things properly we would need to use a Mac Mini Server to manage the iPads and profiles. Contrary to what many people believe, you don't want to pull the iPad straight out of the box and hand it to a student. How are you going to get all the apps on there? How are you going to get all of them to connect to your network?  How long should you spend planning all of this out?  A month? Two? Six? No matter how much you plan, you will never think of everything. I say this for two reasons. You remember Murphy don't you?  He has a law named after him. No matter what you do or how hard you try, there are always going to be problems. The trick will be keeping those problems, issues, or obstacles from being fuel for the naysayers you have around you. (Maybe you don't know anyone like that where you are) We are dealing with kids. You know what I mean, insatiable curiosity, problems solvers deluxe (unless you...

With the number of iPads our district is putting into classrooms there have been many questions coming from all directions. "What do I do with these?" "When are you putting all the games on here?" "Why won't these work?" "Where do I start?" "How do I eat an elephant?" That question is the only one that I feel like answering somedays. The reason I like it more than any others is because the answer applies to almost all the other questions.  "You eat it one bite at a time." One of the first pieces of advice we have given teachers, especially those that have not had the opportunity to work with the iPads as an instructional tool, is to pick one app. Just one app and work with it. When you feel comfortable with it, move on to another.  One of the first apps I suggest starting with is Educreations . This app is a great way to create videos on a basic whiteboard background as tutorials or demonstrations of what you have learned....