Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Category: Tech

QPAT workshop – OurPads: increasing student engagement…

Resources for the QPAT workshop –> OurPads: Increasing student engagement and enhancing learning

Where we talk about how we have started to use iPads at the Nova Career and Education Centre of the New Frontiers School Board.

**updated on Sunday, November 25, 2012 – Summary and feedback of Friday’s workshop, including Ali’s Math apps**

Note page made with Note Anytime

Visual presentation made with Haiku Deck

Summary:
I presented our story and talked about our main learnings:
When introducing new teaching tools be sure to include a lot of teacher-centered PD, allowing time to address teacher concerns with the hows and whys of using new tools, the fear of changing teacher roles, working through discomfort with technology, and allowing for teachers to learn how to use the tools in a meaningful way.

iPads are tools to help teachers bring great pedagogy to their students and learning environments. Don’t throw a bunch of iPads into a classroom and expect magic to happen.

iPads are best used when they are recognized as individual user devices. Don’t try to use them and control them in the same way that you would paper workbooks or computers and laptops. You can not control which apps a student chooses to use on the iPad (beyond limiting the apps you put on it…but even then, a savvy student can download whatever app they want.) What I find great about a tablet is that the apps allow us to offer much more individualized and interactive learning experiences so students are generally more engaged in active participation than evasive techniques.

As opposed to focusing on specific apps, I like to look at what is already available on the iPad that can enhance learning. Specifically, the video capabilities are fabulous ways to practice langauge, understanding, performance tasks in a safe way.

Feedback: We received lots of great feedback, including some that wished we had more time (as did I! I will take that into account for next time. One hour is just not enough time to present AND respond to the needs in the room!) and some that seemed to be asking for more elementary school level apps. As outlined in the workshop description, the session was intended to showcase what we are doing at Nova – an adult education centre. So we don’t really work with elementary level apps. However, I’ve included links below to some blogs and other places that do showcase elementary level apps. I hope that you all made it to the literacy workshop that followed mine, apparently they did highlight quite a few apps for lower levels :)

Ali’s Top 10 Math apps – they range in price from free to $7.00. Only 1 requires wifi to use (Ace).
Preparation
Educreations – great for preparing lessons that students can refer to on their own time or if they need another listen to/look at the explanation or if they missed the class. (I also like its potential for student-created lessons…if a student can create a lesson on a topic, they get it.)

Conversion
Converter – a unit converter for many, many different types of units

Algebra
Algebra Touch – touch and see how algebra works.
Tritutor – search for this in your app store. The links I found all point to the US app store, which won’t work for us but it can be found on the app store from your iPad.
Ace – High School Math Algebra (require wifi). Step-by-step video examples for a variety of high school algebra topics.
HUP Polynomials – more videos…

Geometry
MathGraph – interactive app for graphing circles, elipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas
WinPossible Geometry Tutor – (from the website) Having difficulty with some parts of Geometry or just need a refresher course? Then this video series is for you. With 15 MAJOR CATEGORIES and 81 VIDEO LECTURES totaling over 7 HOURS of lessons, Video Geometry Tutor covers all the essential areas you need to know about Geometry.
Unit Circle

Multi-topic
Math Aptitude – Looks like a comprehensive math learning app for multiple topics (high school). The link goes to the US store, you may need to search for it within the Canadian store or directly from your iPad.

Elementary Level Resources

iPad Apps for Elementary Schools on List.ly
Apps in the Elementary Classroom on Edutopia
Best Educational iPad Apps for Elementary School Aged Kids on ClassyChaos
Top 10 iPad Apps for Elemntary Teachers by Wesley Exon at Not Another History Teacher Blog

My Adult Education Blogs…

AdultEd.TracyRosen.com
ICTFrench.TracyRosen.com

Teacher Centered PD

Other Resources…
Rosetta Stone

November 21, 2012
On Motivation. On Learning. In Ourselves.

Last night, at 10:39, I found out about the midnight deadline for applying to the Google Teacher Academy taking place in New York this October. How was it that I only clued into the application process in the, practically literally, 11th hour? That may have a little something to do with this kind of thing:

Maybe.

I decided to apply.

A few years ago I wrote a post inspired by a line from Michael Wesch: it’s basically about shifting from getting people to love you, to you loving them.

Last year I wrote about how I motivate my students and manage my classroom without reward systems.

And I’m realizing that me in 2012 is not much different from the me when I started teaching 16 years ago. Nah, actually I am a lot different. I’m more focused, I have more knowledge when it comes to working with a diverse student group, more knowledge about pedagogy and curriculum and integrating technology but that focus and knowledge are steeped in the same locus of care that brought me into teaching in the first place.

So my application video is nothing fancy. Really. Nothing. Fancy. It’s 50 some odd seconds of me sitting on my bed looking like I am talking to someone off screen because I still haven’t mastered the iPad video feature (I tend to want to look at my eyes when I’m talking to a camera…) but it is honest and it reflects what I believe needs to be the starting point for anything to really happen in education: the recognition that motivation and learning come first from ourselves. The educators. Discover what motivates us as educators and stay true to that.

July 30, 2012
How can the way I help other educators affect their practice?

I recently completed a 4-month contract as a technology consultant at two adult education centres. I loved it. Throughout the whole experience I felt this is what I am meant to be doing. The focus on tech reached out to my inner geek and the focus on relationship reached in towards my personal ethics of care.

The other day I was doing some thinking about the past 4 months and decided to put it on paper (so to speak) and to frame it within a guiding question. The question I came up with was:

How can the way I help other educators affect their practice?

I used Dabbleboard to help draw it out and came up with this (click to enlarge)

July 13, 2012
Interesting conversation about teaching and technology

I had a very interesting conversation with a colleague the other day. She is a teacher in adult education with upwards of 35 years in the classroom and she said to me that the model we recently used in her class and others, with me going directly into the classroom and working with students, makes sense to her.

I love this drawing of a classroom. It was done by Todd Berman, a substitute teacher in San Francisco. Click it to go to his website.
(I visited her Economics classroom and talked about technology and advertising. Then I returned on 3 different occasions to work directly with individual and small groups of students as they created advertisements for virtual businesses.)

She said (and these are her words) that she will never know enough about tech to be able to teach her students anything new about tech. She said that it is a waste of time to send her off to do workshops to learn a new technology in the hopes that she would then teach it to her students, and that it is best to show the tech to the students so they can use it within the context of her curriculum and that, if anything, they should be the ones showing her how to use it.

This model
a) keeps teachers in the classroom as opposed to sending them out of the classroom for PD.
b) allows teachers to focus on their curriculum while offering different pathways to students to get through it
c) allows for professional collaboration between teachers and consultants
d) fosters student leadership as they learn new tools from a consultant and can show it to each other and their teachers.

We went on to talk about how the big work is in creating teachers like her who are willing to let something like that happen in their classrooms.

I like that idea – the idea of classroom as a site of professional learning.

May 7, 2012
Let me tell you a story … about teaching and technology
I’m teaching a class on creating a radio show and podcasting. I’m working with 11 enthusiastic and interested adult learners and I’m quite excited about it myself. Yesterday was our 2nd meeting.

Let me tell you a little story about teaching and technology…

My plan was 3-fold:
The first two parts were easy, the components were me and them. It was the last section that proved…challenging. And guess what? That last section involved a 10 minute presentation. It required technology. And the technology wasn’t cooperating. I realized it wasn’t cooperating an hour before the course so I did have time to place the presentation on individual laptops for students to view at their tables. The thing was, I wasn’t planning on needing headsets. There was audio. At one point in the presentation I say, “You must be fed up of hearing my voice by now …” When I heard it an asynchronous 6 times I laughed out loud and so did the students. It’s a good thing they have a sense of humour!

Other little things… laptops kept logging out (need to remember to shut off the logout feature) during the class, some of them decided to do the Windows update thing and re-started mid lesson.

Like I said, at least we all had a sense of humour and I knew what was going on nevertheless it was still very frustrating. I had spent a week preparing for this class, not a week straight but on and off for a week. I had an idea of what I wanted to do and it really should have gone off without a hitch but it didn’t.

And. Capital A ‘And’ here… I am a technology consultant. I understand that things sometimes don’t work and the majority of the time I can work around that And still, I was met with this frustration.

When teachers tell me their own stories of how technology trumped their lessons I know that they are less and less willing to try it again. It is frustrating to put so much time into something to have it fall apart because a wire is missing, a network is down, a button they don’t know about needs to be pushed, an ActiveX control needs to be allowed to run, a program needs to be updated, a this, a that.

So where do we go from here?

Is it about teaching teachers how to troubleshoot all of that? It would be nice if everyone knew how but I’m not sure if that is a very practical answer.

The largest protest I hear from teachers about their day is that there is not enough time to do anything. We know that there isn’t. Teachers have so many responsibilities, a mere fraction of which is the hours of time where they are physically tied to their classrooms and the rest generally gets done on their own time. We know that. So throwing more training at them that requires them to use their precious out of class time in order to learn how to troubleshoot technology that they perhaps do not even want to use well…I think that is problematic.

So again. Where do we go from here?

For myself, I am in the process of creating a webpage for the course where I will drop any resources. I’ll be expecting the learners in the course to access any presentations there. It’s something they can do during class time, at home if they have computers, on their phones, whatever their preference or requirement. This way the theory won’t be trumped by the tech. As well, the class time will be reserved for collaboration, creation, and questions.

But that is me. I teach one little course a week. And I am a technology consultant.

Where do we go from here when it comes to working with educators and supporting them with not only the opportunities but the challenges of using technology in the classroom?
April 20, 2012