Student iPad Training Module
Students at a 1:1 school with iPads require a great deal of training before they can use them effectively in the classroom. I developed a powerful, self-paced, online training module for students to complete over the summer. Every video tutorial contained pauses that helped students process and make sense of the task at hand. Sometimes they were asked to stop and think about a question, other times they were asked to experiment with something on their iPad. After watching each video, students created an artifact that gave evidence of their learning. In the end, students gathered all their artifacts and created a presentation to showcase their growth.
The training module is HERE An example of one of the student products is shown to the right |
Socrative - Instant Feedback
Student clickers used to be a novelty in may schools but with the advent of iPads, students can now just download the free app called Socrative. This is a tool I started using because it gives immediate feedback to students and teacher. It also encourages the quieter students to speak out more because instead of having to say an answer out loud in front of the whole class, they can just type it in anonymously. After finishing a quiz in Socrative, it sends a report containing all the students' answers that can be kept for a record. Use it to inform instruction or track progress.
Creating Flipped Lecture Videos with Explain Everything
A flipped classroom environment allows for all students to take as much time as they need when listening to a lecture. Information can be rewound, captured, and discussed in an asynchronous environment. In contrast, face to face lectures can sometime go too fast, too slow, or certain students are afraid to speak up for fear of embarrassment. Either form of content delivery can be effective if done well, but in the science classroom I preferred the flipped approach because it opened up more time for lab work, PBL, and problem solving. Explain Everything is an app that I used to record lectures and flip my class from 2011-2015.
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Goformative.com - Give Formative Feedback in Real time
Goformative is a new website that allows teachers to give formative feedback to students as they draw a diagram or work out a problem. I used it in 8th grade science for a unit on waves. I wanted to know if students understood the difference between transverse and longitudinal waves amongst a variety of other objectives. Goformative helped me give feedback to students in real-time as they drew. Additionally, it helped me give feedack anonymously to the whole class. When a group of students made a common mistake, instead of taking the time to address each of them individually, I could address them all at once. This was a huge time saver and made class time much more efficient.
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Digital Storytelling
Digital storytelling takes the words of a story and combines them with compelling audio and visuals. Some of the best teachers are those that can tell stories that help make sense of the content that they teach. There are a variety of tools that can be used to create a digital story, but the ones that I used in this video were a GoPro camera and iMovie.
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