When I first started teaching I had no idea what the hell I was doing. Most young teachers don’t. But I will take the blame: I thought I knew how a class was supposed to run, generally, and I set it up like that. Looking back I realize what a doofus I was being.
To wit: it seemed reasonable to ask 20 kids “does anyone have any questions?” And while for some students that is a reasonable request, for the most part the question is a waste of time. I couldn’t possibly get everyone involved with that question, even though it seemed to be extended to the entire class.
Another mistake I used to make was to have lots of large group discussions. It is intuitive: you get more opinions in a large group discussion than a bunch of small groups. The weaker kids can listen to alternative opinions, broaden their exposure to different concepts. This was also largely a waste of time, because large group discussions were inevitably discussions with a small number of vocal kids and an audience of less-vocal and less-confident kids. Duh.
Anyway, I used to do all that, and I realize now why it is generally less effective than engaging students on an individual basis. Tech makes this task easier.
Google Forms, Documents and Sites are my go-to tech tool for engaging every student simultaneously. They can work together on a document or a site, or they can input responses into a form and I can share the results with them. However it happens, working in a shared space lets me target individuals who need help, it lets students share knowledge and experience, and it mediates the anxiety of a large group discussion.
I took a look at socrative.com a while ago, but I’m going to experiment with it for the first time soon. It is a fancy version of an “e-clicker” tool – the teacher asks some questions or provides some prompt, and the students respond with their own “clickers”. The original clickers were little boxes with a few buttons with which students could vote. Socrative.com takes this to a new place using web apps and the possibility of using any device – laptop, phone, iPad, anything with web access.
I used to think e-clickers were really bad… I mean, in what sense is a multiple choice question an interesting or effective assessment tool? First, I went and took the GRE. It reminded me that multiple choice tests can be mind-bending in the best possible way. Second, I realized that when I stand up and ask a group of kids: “Which characters in Macbeth are blamed for murder of Duncan?” I am asking a kind of low-level factual question, but an important question for reviewing basic information and helping to imprint that material in the students’ working memories. This is a key component of learning, so I might as get good at it. I have the creative project thing down, no problem. It’s the delivery of material that is generally being ignored in education these days, to students’ detriment.
Socrative.com activities could be run for only a few minutes each class, and it can become a kind of ritual, a way of constantly reviewing, and a way for the teacher identify weaknesses and gaps. The questions and prompts can be created easily in an Excel template, or collaboratively using Google Spreadsheets and then imported. Socrative even has a kind of game template for speedy reviews, and a template for end-of-class learning reflection. It is fast formative assessment at its best. It has the added benefit of putting mobile phones to good use, rather than poor use. And suddenly the entire class is engaged at the same time, no exceptions.
Socrative.com is in public beta, so it’s free to use. Jump on it. Teachers visit: t.socrative.com
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I’ve been spending this academic year doing two things: preparing for PhD programs in Literature, and working with iPads in the classroom. The two are not entirely unrelated – I’m becoming a kind of expert on iPads and how to leverage them effectively in a number of different educational environments, and I suspect that there will be heavy iPad influence in higher education, like there is in secondary ed.
Because on the one hand I read and am interested in lots of literary, philosophical and neuroscientific stories related to education, and on the other hand I’m generating a lot of content specifically about iPads, I’ve decided to spin-off the iPad work to a new site: iPad Academic. It’s like Wandering Academic, but with a very specific focus: original iPad content. I’m not going to be copying and pasting stuff from other blogs and other news sites. iPad Academic is all original, all iPad, mostly geared toward teachers and students, but with some attention going to being productive and creative with this device. Anyway, feel free to bookmark it, sign up for the RSS feed, whatever. Send it to the tech people in your lives that might gain a little insight or who might find it useful.
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]]>As with anything Apple, the recent education-themed announcement has everyone dreaming of a better future for the children, and all that. The question you keep reading is “will e-textbooks change the face of education?”, just like people asked about the iPad when it first came out. And while I’m very impressed by the design [...] No related posts.]]>
As with anything Apple, the recent education-themed announcement has everyone dreaming of a better future for the children, and all that. The question you keep reading is “will e-textbooks change the face of education?”, just like people asked about the iPad when it first came out. And while I’m very impressed by the design of the new textbooks available on iBooks 2, and I love the fact that they include touchable animations and videos to supplement text, the books themselves don’t seem revolutionary. They are evolutionary, certainly – they are digitized, enhanced versions of learning materials we’ve been using for decades. They are very engaging, at least some of them are. I get it. They are cheap, too. Great. Up-to-date, portable, and I’m able to take notes and quiz myself. Perfect. Thank you, Apple. Really, thank you.
But a better textbook doesn’t herald a new form of education. The sample chapters from McGraw-Hill and Pearson were just textbooks, with some fancy-looking animations. E.O. Wilson’s “Life on Earth” is really good, but it is sort of a self-promotion packaged as a book: the end of chapter 2, titled “Project Based Learning”, is just a short description of what will appear in the book as projects, rather than an actual project for students to complete. Whatever, there is a timeline for all of this, I understand.
What really interests me is iBooks Author. Fiddling around with it, it feels like a version of Pages built for the iPad screen, with organizational tools that fit the paradigm of “Book”: chapters, sub-chapters, title pages, etc. There are built-in ways to include multimedia components, like little comprehension self-quizzes and image galleries. If you are handy with a tool such as Hype, you can easily put your HTML5 animations into a book. It’s a great package of components for the budding book publisher.
But it struck me – why not create course materials with this? As a teacher, why shouldn’t I just craft my course documents and all the rest, package it up, and distribute it to my students? Well, there are several reasons iBooks Author isn’t ready for this.
No copy-paste. Actually, there is a version of copy-paste. Select some text, un-highlight it, “Search” for the text, then copy it from the search bar. But this is not true copy-paste, and so iBooks will be useless for students who want to paste notes into other apps like Noteshelf or Evernote. That is a true short-coming. I understand the need to protect the content of reference materials, but there should a small fair-use maximum word count that can be copied.
Note-taking is not robust enough. I mean, this is a touch-screen device. Made by Apple, the company that created iBooks. Why oh why haven’t they included the ability to mark the page itself, like with a stylus? Is it because Steve Jobs hated styluses? Well, he was wrong about that. He really was. I’m running two iPad pilot programs with high school students, and they need the stylus for effective creative and scholarly tasks. You just need it. Sorry, Steve. And iBooks, if it had an awesome handwriting engine like Noteshelf, would be the killer education app. It’s not the case.
No print, or open in… If I wrote a book and wanted to include a worksheet for a teacher to use with her class, she would be unable to print the worksheet, copy the text, or open the file in some other app that would accommodate her desire to save one page. In that sense it’s no good for collecting lesson plans or anything people might use - it will only be useful for materials people might read. I guess you could include the worksheet as an image in the book, have the reader open the image in full screen view, and then screenshot the worksheet, and paste it into Pages or Noteshelf or something like that. Pretty cumbersome.
I hate to hate on Apple products, because this is an exciting development for schools who want to cut down on textbook costs, who want to increase engagement with their students, and all that. We want the same thing where I work, which is why we’re running 1:1 iPad pilots in the first place. I guess I kind of expected more from iBooks Author.
But lo, there is a tool for the Mac that makes iPad-friendly books, allows you to print and share individual pages of a book, and allows for handwritten notes. It doesn’t, like iBooks, allow the author to update all the readers with a newly edited copy, but copy-paste will work just fine. It’s called Pages. For the teacher who self-publishes, Pages is the better, more flexible tool for now.
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]]>I was disgusted when I read this. The Chester Upland School District has implemented huge cuts on personnel and budgets for its schools, teachers, and staff. Class sizes are around 40 in some areas. And on January 11, the district will run out of funds to pay its teachers. [...] Related posts:
]]>I was disgusted when I read this. The Chester Upland School District has implemented huge cuts on personnel and budgets for its schools, teachers, and staff. Class sizes are around 40 in some areas. And on January 11, the district will run out of funds to pay its teachers. The teachers’ reaction is to keep coming to work for free, because, as one teacher puts it, “We are adults, we will find a way. The students don’t have a contingency plan. They need to be educated…”
In what other professional field would this be allowed to occur? In what other professional field would that be the reaction of the professionals? Imagine workers for the Department of Transportation – you know, the guys that stand on the highway slowing traffic, while their colleagues do essential public work like fix roads and clear debris and other difficult, largely invisible but hugely important tasks. Imagine the state running out of money for roads (that never seems to happen, it is always schools that get cut, isn’t it?). And so, they say, hey guys, after January 11th, we won’t be able to pay you. Sorry.
What would the reaction be? I guarantee that not a single PENNDOT worker, for all their dedication and hard work, would put up with it and say “Well, the roads need to be repaired if people are going to get around, you know, to get to work. People don’t have a contingency for the roads being undrivable. We are adults, so we will find a way. We’ll be there on Monday, paycheck or not.”
I’m not sure if teachers in this situation are heroes or suckers.
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Writing apps are a dime a dozen. It isn’t often I come across a noteworthy writing app because most are so similar in design and feature set. One is pretty much as good as the other, and can be interchanged depending on your particular workflow – Evernote, Dropbox, iCloud, what have you.
Phraseology breaks the mold and does so in a way that will benefit student writers as well as professional writers. One clear hole in the iPad writing universe is the ease of right-clicking a word and seeing a list of synonyms, as one can do on desktop software like Word. Apple’s excellent Pages app lets you look up words in-line, but doesn’t offer thesaurus capabilities. The lookup is a straight lookup: you get the definition of the word you selected. Done.
One of the key features of Phraseology is the link to another app, Terminology. Adding a second app to the mix might seem like unnecessary complication, but in real world use, it is remarkably beneficial (with one caveat, which seems like a potential Achilles heel). Terminology is Agile Tortoise’s popular dictionary app that functions like a semantic database of words rather than a dictionary, per se. Search a word, and it appears with a definition, as well as a list of synonyms that are more specific and less specific. Phraseology lets you select a word, look it up in terminology, find a suitable replacement, and “send it back” to Phraseology, all pretty seamlessly, and with a back-and-forth that rivals any app duet I’ve seen on the iPad to date. (Caveat: words looked up in their plural form will return zero results. I’ve contacted the developer about this, who claims that plurals will be dealt with in a future update.)
This simple and powerful addition to a writing tool makes it different than Pages or iA Writer or any of the other writing apps available. What else helps it stack up?
- Clean design. Simple and user friendly. What a writer wants and needs: word count, a few fonts, quick information about your text such as syntactic data, and the ability to export your text to other apps or email it to Evernote or somewhere.
- Rearrange your paragraphs. I’ve never seen this in a writing app. Visually rearrange text and add or delete paragraph breaks.
- Drill down on your syntax. Helpful for getting rid of adverbs or understanding what verbs you use regularly, in order to expand the base. Jumps to the selection with a tap.
- For the nerdy nerds out there, Phraseology has the ability to understand Markdown as well, and can export and email the HTML version of your text.
Overall, even though it doesn’t have embedded iCloud or Dropbox support, which would make it oh so much better, with the close relationship to Terminology, Phraseology makes a valuable addition to a student or professional writing arsenal.
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Instapaper makes reading Internet articles more like reading and less like surfing the web. It is perfect for longer pieces of journalism or essay, even horribly long emails.
The problem with the Internet is that it encourages speed. It’s all about finding things quickly, or flitting here and there, following the bread crumbs of links scattered around. It’s wonderful if what you want is a specific piece of information, or if you want to sample the serendipitous delights of a global information landscape. It is horrible if what you want to do is read.
Instapaper is one of a number of similar services that I have written about in the past, but it is the best service that also happens to have the best iPad app in its category.
With the click of a button, from RSS readers to web browsers, what you are reading can be converted into an experience that rivals and, in my opinion, exceeds the experience of apps like Kindle and iBooks. In a nutshell: if you find an article on a website that you want to read in a more pleasing format, away from the distraction of ads and navigation links and branding and twitter feeds in the sidebar, you click your “Save to Instapaper” button. You can install this button easily in any browser, including iPad Safari. When you login to instapaper.com or the next time you sync your Instapaper app, it will serve up your articles in a readable and customizable format. As an added bonus, the articles are downloaded for off-line reading (this is great for long plane rides).
The app is so well-designed, it is difficult to describe without just showing you. Check out the screen shots below. There you will see the ability to archive the articles (keeps them off your device), share articles with a circle of friends (something that Google Reader got rid of recently), discover new reading material from a curated list, and even find the articles from directly within the app using the dedicated browser.
Something I appreciate: Like Evernote, each Instapaper account comes with its own secret email address: if you send a link to this address, it will be added to your Instapaper account. There are other extra features like this – check out Instapaper Extras.
Best of all, the service itself is totally free (the app is $4.99). Get it and start using it. You will be surprised what being a reader feels like, as opposed to being a surfer.
Here are some great websites to find longer articles, perfect for loading up your new Instapaper app for the holidays:
The Best Magazine Articles Ever, from kk.org
Give Me Something To Read (Instapaper sister site)
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Noteshelf is the best handwriting tool available on the iPad.
Qualifying “Best”
Noteshelf delivers the most true-to-life look of a pen on paper. I have tried a slew of other apps, including apps that boast PDF import, text editing, and different connectivity options. While the features might stack up in favor of apps like Notes Plus, Notify and Ghostwriter, each of those alternatives has an inferior handwriting rendering engine. I have tried my best to make my notes look good in those apps, and I always fall short. Not so with Noteshelf. The handwriting I can lay down with minimal effort is smooth, and the rendering engine is fast enough to keep up with an ever-so-slightly slower version of my typical handwriting speed. Given the other features of the app, I am willing to slow down a tiny bit in order to produce beautiful digital notes that can be saved in a variety of ways, and ultimately text-searchable in Evernote (more on this later).
Noteshelf is a nicely designed app. Sometimes I get annoyed when too many real-life metaphors are used in app design, like the “real wood” of the shelf and the customizable notebook covers, but the app keeps it to a minimum and the metaphorical elements never get in the way of my usage. It is pleasant to the look at.
Noteshelf’s feature set is almost perfect. It lets you create a notebook, quickly add pages to the notebook, choose a style of paper (for each page or for the entire notebook), and get to work. You can import a picture, or take a new picture. It has pens, highlighters, and erasers. It has a wrist-guard, a select feature (for cutting and pasting portions of the page, which is a very cool feature to say the least), and the all-important zoom function.
Zoom is a necessary feature of any handwriting app on the iPad because the screen is very small and given the nature of the capacitative touch screen, the nib of a stylus must be about the width of a fat finger. You can’t escape it, apparently. Zoom allows you to use a “fat finger” stylus and get fine-point pen results. (See images for examples of my work. I really feel as if my notes become a little, well, pretty, when I do them in Noteshelf. Vain, I know.)
Exporting notes from Noteshelf to other useful places is a key feature, and they have implemented it beautifully. There are just enough options, not too many, and just the right ones, for my uses at least. First, exporting can happen for an entire notebook, or selected pages, at the discretion of the user. Notes can be exported as separate images or as a PDF, which collects the pages together into a single file. The file or files can be sent via email (standard, sure), iTunes (really? Does anyone use this?), print (useful when I get some printing capabilities hooked up), and the best options: Dropbox, Evernote and iPad Album. Dropbox is self-evident, the iPad Album lets you import the pages into other apps (like the WordPress app or Blogsy, for posting to a blog). The beauty of exporting files to Evernote is that your handwriting becomes (more or less) text-searchable after Evernote’s OCR gets finished. It’s lovely to be able to search Evernote for a meeting outline or a draft of something that I hand-wrote. It’s the perfect combination of old-school and new-fangled.
What it lacks is the ability to annotate PDFs, but there are other great apps for that purpose. It would make Noteshelf the end-all of handwriting apps for me, really, but I understand that the developers want to focus on doing what they do well: making the single best handwriting app on the App Store.
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]]>Get it now! Make it a holiday gift!
Here’s what people are saying about this fine collection of essays and stories:
‘This terrific and substantial [...] Related posts:
]]>Get it now! Make it a holiday gift!
Here’s what people are saying about this fine collection of essays and stories:
‘This terrific and substantial volume is a vital step in clarifying the experiences, gifts, and struggles of those who grew up around the world, or with those who grew up elsewhere. I can t wait to teach with it.’
–Wendy Laura Belcher, PhD, Professor of Literature, Princeton University
‘Well-grounded in classical perspectives and new visions of what it means to live in an intercultural world, the book offers a wonderful array of memoir, research, interviews, theory and even poetry. There s something for everyone here!’
–Anne P. Copeland, PhD, Director, The Interchange Institute
‘The selections here, varied as they are, share the quiet, profound, and rich experiences of people writing on the most innocent years, transcendent of cultural boundaries. Reading this book is a travel across the globe with an impressive group of worldly citizens.’
–Morten Ender, PhD, Professor of Sociology, United States Military Academy at West Point
Abstract:
Crossing borders and boundaries, countries and cultures, they are the children of the military, diplomatic corps, international business, education and missions communities. They are called Third Culture Kids or Global Nomads, and the many benefits of their lifestyle expanded worldview, multiplicity of languages, tolerance for difference are often mitigated by recurring losses of relationships, of stability, of permanent roots. They are part of an accelerating demographic that is only recently coming into visibility. In this groundbreaking collection, writers from around the world address issues of language acquisition and identity formation, childhood mobility and adaptation, memory and grief, and the artist’s struggle to articulate the experience of growing up global. And, woven like a thread through the entire collection, runs the individual’s search for belonging and a place called home. This book provides a major leap in understanding what it s like to grow up among worlds. It is invaluable reading for the new global age.
Seriously, go get it now. It’s a beautiful book, for you and for your school library.
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Jonah Lehrer describes how our brains react to different paintings and different wines, showing that information [...] No related posts.]]>
Jonah Lehrer describes how our brains react to different paintings and different wines, showing that information about the object – its authenticity, its price – will shape our perception of the object. If we are told a painting is authentic, will we like it more? If we are told a wine is more expensive, will it taste better? What happens in our brains that might facilitate this?
This reminds me of other “brain hacks”, such as studies that suggest if a teacher tells his students that they will do very well on a test, that it is easy for them, or that he believes they will do very well, their scores will be statistically significantly higher than if he had said nothing. Also, telling the group that boys will do better than girls will affect performance. (Read more about performance priming here.)
Lesson: you are very suggestible. Try to remember that.
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]]>From that day, every evening at 10:00 P.M. for the next month, five or six of his administrative staff members and I would be injected with the same painkiller that Kim Jong Il was taking. [...] No related posts.]]>
From that day, every evening at 10:00 P.M. for the next month, five or six of his administrative staff members and I would be injected with the same painkiller that Kim Jong Il was taking. He was afraid he would become addicted to it, and didn’t want to be the only one.
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