. This is a post I started some time ago ... so I'll try and finish it and reflect on what's been a tough year on all fronts. As a teacher, first and foremost, my big concern this year was how to maintain useful contact with my students in lockdown and how to try and create opportunities for them to tell me how they were going; and for me to know how they were progressing through the learning I wanted them to complete. I teach digital technologies/computer science, and I’m generally comfortable in the tech I use, but not all of my students are. My students are like everyone else's - a mix of abilities and a mix of technical abilities, so I was a bit worried that some of the ways I have tried to engage with students see me using digital tools that I’m comfortable with, but I wonder if there are better ones for my students. So - in no real order of importance - here have been my main "aha" moments. Oh, and before I forget, everything student-related has been done on my 11" iPad Pro. So easy to carry around everywhere and the battery lasts all day. So, thanks again to Graham at Cyclone for helping out with that! 1. Flipping the classroom works really well. I guess I always though that flipping worked - its just that I didn't do it all the time. Now I do. Even when in face to face classes. I ended up deciding to use Loom for recording my video lessons. They offer educators a free account which gives you up to 45 minutes recording (though you never go much more than 5 minutes at a time). Nice thing about Loom is that they have an iPad app which works really well, and I used this to create a large number of videos. We use an LMS (SchoolBox out of Australia) which has a number of features, one of which turned out to be a godsend for me. By using this feature I can get an instant update on the progress my students are making through their projects. As an example - this is a view I get Now, this obviously shows that everyone has completed all of the tasks, but over the course of the actual work you get to see exactly who is doing what and where they are up to. A second part of this flipped concept was to work out how to know if the students were having difficulty or finding it too easy. This is where I stumbled upon a nice idea from Donna Golightly at UTB . Using her idea to create an "exit poll" from a Google form saw me have this little form set up in no time Students took 30 seconds at the end of each class to leave just a quick note of what they were having trouble with or if they needed extra help - as they would rather do that than ask a question in a live streamed class (we use MS Teams for that). A quick bit of conditional formatting in the Google form generated spreadsheet gave a different colour for each response making it really easy to identify those who were needing some form of help. In fact this worked so well that I still use it in class when not in lockdown. 2. You never stop learning I found so many new resources when I went looking that reinforced to me there is still so much I don't know. Some of my younger students (13 year olds) missed the in-class environment, so it was important to run a live stream whenever we had a class scheduled during lockdown even though there was not much to say (as all the work was prerecorded on Loom). This gave students the time to chat about how they felt and just generally have a talk. General wellbeing was pretty important and many of our live chats were about nothing much more than the weather or what was everyone watching on Netflix. I always left the stream running for the entire scheduled class time so that students could just pop in and out as they wished - to either clarify a point about their learning or to just talk. At the end of lockdown I was pretty sure that all students had in fact learned more than they would have if we had been in regular classes, and the project work they produced was of a higher quality than previously seen. So - I've continued this process back in normal school over recent months and it is going just as well. 3. a new tool worth using I stumbled upon a number of new tools in fact. Perusall is a new one for me that I have begun using with my senior IB class. Rather than me talk about it - here is a video that takes you through it. I don't use the grading much, but I do use the discussion platforms and have found it a near perfect tool for sharing news items for my ITGS class. The new video annotation tool lets you add a discussion question to any part of a Youtube video, for example. And while this is a website - it runs just fine under iPadOS and Safari. 4. Database on iPad In NZ we have our new Digital Technologies curriculum in roll out. That will be a bit of a focus for me next year as far as ensuring we have sufficient coverage across our school. I've been collating our information across the school over the year and to be honest have struggled to find a decent way to house and manage the data. Over the past couple of days have been looking at putting it all into a database ... and have tried using AirTable for something serious for the first time. I've messed with it with senior IB classes as an introduction to relational database structure but never gone into anything larger than just a few records. Below is a screenshot of one of the views of the data - I'm really happy with how this is working out and the data can easily be shared to our LMS by publishing embedded views of various layouts. As well as working on the web, there is an iPad app for it as well.
7 Comments
Darryl Coughey
2/12/2020 02:19:25 pm
Nice article Rob.
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Rob McCrae
3/12/2020 10:08:07 am
Thanks Darryl. What I really need one of Ray Kurzweil’s brain implant chips so that I can connect to the web permanently ...
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Danny Bedingfield
3/12/2020 09:03:33 am
Thanks Rob, its really great to see you carry on the flipped classroom idea that worked so well over Lockdown. It appears to me that many teachers started learning some really great digital skills over lockdown but most seem to have gone back to their traditional methods.
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Rob McCrae
3/12/2020 10:13:56 am
Thanks for the comment and question Danny. Our systems are web based by and large - so that presents no issue for an iPad these days with a full(ish) version of Safari and iPadOS 13 or 14.
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Abby Hirst
3/12/2020 09:06:14 am
Hi Rob,
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Rob McCrae
3/12/2020 10:17:08 am
Thanks for the comment Abby - and thanks for the mention on LinkedIn too.
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Conrad Langridge
7/12/2020 04:15:33 pm
Rob, I love the 'exit poll' idea! So simple and quick and emojis resonate with teenagers.
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