For those not familiar, Haiku is Google's powerful education app: It is essentially a class portal, gradebook, dropbox, and blog--all in one, with all aspects highly integrated. Students engage one another through discussion boards, student work is submitted, returned, and graded on Haiku, and student feedback and grades are visible in the student gradebook. Everything is customizable--and so Haiku has the potential to be a major market winner for the #edtech future.
In essence, it is a very powerful classroom environment, and can enable flipped learning, a paperless classroom, and a transparent feedback/grading system.
The Haiku app, on the other hand, still feels as if it's in Beta testing. Not only is it a severely limited version of the Haiku software, but it seems to have certain glitches, too. That, and it's not entirely fit for optimizing all that an iPad has to offer in a classroom:
- Haiku iPad App is severely limited and imbalanced between (and within) teacher and student use:
- Students can view assignments, class calendars, and discussion boards. However, all of this is done in the Haiku "browser", an internet browser that exists outside of the app. It's almost as if the Haiku app is just a homescreen for such a browser.
- Students can't easily upload work from one app (say Adobe Reader or Google Docs) to a Haiku assignment in the Haiku app. Instead, they have to be in the browser, and then in the typical Haiku page layout->dropbox->assignment-->submit. This is far more steps than what might be possible in an iPad environment.
- Teachers can't do anything in the app, other than see their pages and see record of student submissions. Teachers can't create pages, grade work, or comment on student writing/work in the app.
- Haiku Google App is not limited--it's expansive, if anything, but could use some easy fixes for far more optimal use
- Better grading software! The annotation software is terrible. Why can't there be some sort of track comments or standardized comments interface?
- Better grading formatting! When I return an annotated paper, all of my annotations appear like red "flags" that are only visible in Adobe Reader, but are indecipherable to a student opening the pdf in any other environment.
- More obvious integration with turnitin.com. As of now, turnitin is an "activity" but not the primary format for grading. I would propose to Haiku that they re-think their grading contractor. Currently it's "Crocadoc". If Crocadoc can't get its act together, why not go with turnitin as the primary contractor? Turnitin.com offers far more of a robust, standardized, and dynamic grading environment, besides for its obvious benefits of educating around academic integrity by screening for plagiarized writing.
- Haiku App Crashes:
- Students trying to upload files to Haiku App discussion boards have experienced crashes multiple times.
- Thus, having asked students to take a picture of an image, upload the image, and then comment on one another's images with some frustration and challenges, I will likely not try such an activity again until Haiku offers a fix to the problem in the app (seems to work fine on a computer).
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