Showing posts with label Notability. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Notability. Show all posts

Monday, October 28, 2019

Mac's New Catalina Sidecar Shows Great Promise for iPads & Education


Recently Apple’s new operating system for Macs, Catalina, was released. When looking through the new features and debating how soon I should upgrade, I noticed Sidecar. Sidecar allows users with an iPad to use it as a second display for their Mac, either mirroring or extending their desktop. But it also allows way more than that—you can use the iPad itself to control the Mac, sort of like a Remote Desktop program. This caught my attention because we are always looking for ways for our teachers to make the most of the technology tools we have to help deepen learning experiences and make instruction more meaningful. Catalina Sidecar seems like a great new feature to do just that. 

Back in the early 2000s we installed interactive whiteboards in almost all of our classrooms and trained teachers to use the software. As I wrote previously, SMARTBoards were a catalyst for future technology integration and helped to push our teachers to digitize their curriculum. They helped teachers think about how to make lessons more engaging and interactive. 

Over the past few years many schools have been getting rid of interactive whiteboards and replacing them with HDTVs. Unfortunately doing this removes much of the interactivity possible and instruction has to move back in time to either pre-made slide presentations or lessons that limit how much a teacher can annotate, sketch and interact with the displayed content in general. There are many instructional benefits to having an open canvas/space to work out a problem, draw with digital ink, mark something up, etc. Having this electronically to be instantly saved, stored and/or shared collaboratively is lost when the interactive teaching tool is removed from the classroom. 

At our elementary level, much of our curriculum is in SMART Notebook after well over 15 years of use of that program. So as we look toward the future use of interactive displays, we don’t want to just replace SMART Boards with HDTV displays that don’t allow the teacher to interact with the content on it. That would be going backwards and against instructional best practices. 

Many of our teachers currently use their iPad during instruction and project it wirelessly onto a screen using software like AirSquirrel's Reflector or an Apple TV. Usually they are using an app like Notability to write and mark up something together with their students. But for our teachers with years' worth of curriculum in SMARTNotebook, switching entirely to an iPad would mean a lot of work to change the platform and/or start over rebuilding lessons. 

In my initial tests of Sidecar as pictured above, SMARTNotebook can controlled through an iPad connected wirelessly to a newer Mac connected by a HDMI dongle to either a projector or a HDTV. The display can either mirror the Mac's desktop or be an extension of it, allowing the teacher to have dual monitors which is super helpful. Sidecar allows the instructor to freely move around the room, write on the iPad and interact with and use the tools of SMARTNotebook (or any other program on the Mac). So not only could you potentially remove the SMARTBoard but keep the interactivity and the software, you gain the ability to move around the room and no longer have to stand at the display. This is very helpful for classroom management (see Tip #5 for a Successful 1:1 Implementation: Make Classroom Management an Early and Continuous Focus).

All of our teachers have an iPad Generation 6 and many have an Apple Pencil. However, not many of our teachers have a MacBook, let alone the newer models needed--most have a PC desktop connected to a SMARTBoard. So as we continue to test out Sidecar, we will need to weigh the pros along with the costs. But instead of buying replacement SMARTBoards this initially looks much more promising!

Interestingly, I found one HDTV model we had where this didn't work, and two that did, so be sure to do your own testing. And if you are considering this for classroom use and test things out, let me know what you think. FYI, Apple has detailed instructions for Sidecar here.

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Monday, April 15, 2019

Exploring the Respiratory System with Augmented/Virtual Reality & More in Seventh Grade Science

Students in Kaylene Boos’ seventh grade life science class at Minnetonka Middle School West are studying about the respiratory system. In the past the lesson involved a lot of lecture and note taking. Naturally students didn’t find this past method of content delivery very interesting. Teachers are always improving their instruction, and over the past few years, middle school science teachers have restructured the learning activities to be more engaging for the students. On Monday afternoon when I was present, students were rotating among eight different stations for five minutes each, very engaged in activities.

At one of the stations students used the Virtuali-tee app. This augmented reality app allows students to scan a special T-shirt with their iPad and see the body systems inside the torso of the person/shirt, including the respiratory system. Funds from the PTO were granted to purchase the shirts for each seventh grade science teacher. As pictured, students could hold their iPad like a window into the respiratory system. As they moved it around, they were able to see inside a lung. Augmented and virtual reality show a lot of promise in the opportunities that will be available for learning, and activities this seem to just be the start of what’s possible. 



At another station students watched a video about the respiratory system and answered questions, recording their answers in Notability. At a third station, students completed an online labeling activity in which they had to race to beat the clock identifying the parts of the respiratory system. Another station consisted of sorting vocabulary terms and then photographing and inserting the image of the result into the Notability file. Students also researched answers to questions online and took a Schoology quiz at two other stations and the last station had a model of a working lung made out of a 2 liter pop bottle.

These activities cover multiple dimensions on our Minnetonka Teaching & Learning Framework: communication, collaboration, personalized learning, critical thinking, use of technology for learning, and more. Switching stations every five minutes kept the students active and moving around. They also worked on each activity in shorts bursts, so I did not see them losing interest or becoming bored with the learning. I certainly would have preferred to learn in this manner myself back in school. Plus when I was teaching, I should have designed more active learning opportunities like this for my own students!


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Monday, December 10, 2018

A Day in Fourth Grade Math: Enhancing Learning With iPads & More


Last week I was at Minnewashta Elementary School when fourth grade students were in math classes. When I walked into Jeff Beckstrom’s classroom I could see students were learning about triangles with a student teacher. I heard terms like scalene, obtuse, equilateral, right, length, and more. I remembered teaching about this myself 23 years ago when I taught fourth grade math starting my teaching career in Minnetonka. Although the content and objectives were the same, so much about the instruction had changed. I taught with an overhead projector, transparencies and markers and students had a textbook, paper and a pencil. Now in 2018, paper and pencils were still present and being used, but each student had an iPad and the teacher had a SMARTBoard connected to a computer.

One of the most noticeable differences for me was how many more tools were instantly accessible at the learner’s fingertips. This school year we increased the number of iPads in our fourth grade classroom sets providing enough so that every student has a device. Students in K-3 classrooms have a class set of six iPads and students in grades 5-12 have an iPad that they carry to and from school each day. With the increase of devices in fourth grade this year, every student can use technology for learning at any point throughout the day, and they can save and store their work without having to log in to a shared device. This really increases the amount of time for enhanced and individualized learning.

 
The day before I visited the classroom students had cut out a variety of triangles on paper and sorted and named these. Then they had each taken photos of their work and even labeled the images as pictured. Students were referring back to these photos during the lesson while I was present, something that wasn’t possible back when I was an elementary math teacher. Students were also using Notability to complete some problems on a worksheet (as you can see pictured as well). Since they don’t bring their iPad home, they had notes and definitions writing on paper (also pictured). se

Every few minutes in the lesson, the teacher would guide the students into a different activity, really doing a nice job of maintaining their attention and keeping them engaged and motivated. Students used some apps to practice measuring angles, such as Pattern Shapes (pictured). They also worked through problems on IXL (pictured). And throughout the lesson, students used the teacher’s Schoology site as the go to place to access these different materials (pictured). Each of these activities complimented one another nicely to really enhance the instruction and students’ learning. I sure wish I had all this access to technology a couple decades ago when I was trying to teach my students these same skills--it’s obvious how much more students can learn and how much more they are able to understand with all these technological resources at their fingertips!

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Monday, October 30, 2017

Top 10 Tips for Successful 1:1 Implementations

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Last week at our biannual Minnetonka School District Site Visit, one of the breakout sessions for interested attendees was our Top 10 Tips for Successful 1:1 Implementations. Even though our 1:1 program is with iPads, the tips for success apply to any device or platform.

I have written about some of the tips listed below in the past in detail as an individual blog post. You can view the presentation slides farther below which contain links to further information about each of these tips. I hope ideas listed here are beneficial for you. I also hope to write about each of these tips in more detail in the future.
  1. Execute the Planning & Rollout Carefully & Deliberately 
  2. Flip Student Training
  3. Continual & Differentiated Teacher Training
  4. Make Classroom Management an Early & Continuous Focus
  5. Use tools for Formative Assessment 
  6. Promote Collaboration with Google Apps
  7. Have a robust LMS as the Hub of Student Learning 
  8. Inspire Creation vs. Consumption
  9. Teach Students to Be Responsible & Focused
  10. Parent Education is Critical
You can learn more about our 1:1 program, iPads, and use of technology for learning in the related posts below:  
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    Monday, September 11, 2017

    Even More Minnetonka iPad Integration: Examples from Middle School


    Minnebytes: Multi Examples of 
    Middle School iPad Integration (One per week)
    Our instructional technology staff continue to collect the best practices, favorite ideas and tips for 1:1 integration in all curricular areas from our teachers. They take these and share them with our teachers and parents each week. Many of these middle school "Minnebytes" are device agnostic and in a wide variety of curricular areas. The middle school Minnebytes were started last year by Sara Hunt and will continue this school year, so check back often to see new ideas each week. You can access the high school Minnebytes which I wrote about earlier below as well.

     Middle School West principal Dr. Paula Hoff highlights these examples of technology integration in her biweekly newsletters to parents. She does this in the form of a TouchCast video. In this video, she explains how teachers are using the Minnetonka Framework and technology to deepen the learning for their students. Here is a past video in which she highlights technology integration and its connections to the Minnetonka Framework which gives you an idea of how she is using the tool to communicate with parents. 

    You can learn more about our 1:1 program, iPads, and use of technology for learning in the related posts below:
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