Final Post and Some Conclusions: Best Practices for iPad Integration and School Presentation

Well, this is it! The blog's final post for a year-long experiment in iPad integration. 

For my end-of-year professional development presentation, I reviewed my blogged experience in classroom iPad integration, as well as my student survey. I interspersed my case study with both popular manuals on best practices and various studies and research articles on iPad integration.

As a record of my presentation, I offer below a few summaries on best practices for iPad integration, as well as some resources for further reading and a link to my full presentation.


Best Practices

5 Principles of integration (from iPads in the Classroom: From Consumption and Curation to Creation (Daccord and Reich, 2014))

1. Technology must be in the service of learning. Without a clear vision for learning, technology is the engine of a ship without a compass.
2. Tablets are not computers. There are some things they do much better. There are some things that they do much worse. Focus on exploiting what they do best.
3. iPads are mobile, flexible media production devices, not repositories of apps. Teachers need a vision of powerful student-owned learning, and a few basic apps for media production and sharing.
4. The iPad has a design bias towards consumption; great teaching has a design bias towards student production. To make the iPad support powerful learning, educators move from consuming content to curation and creation.
5. Technology initiative will only work with broad support from community stakeholders: parents, teachers, students, and the community.

The Rule of Six (from How to Teach with an iPad (Norwood 2012))

1. Gather: Research, collect, and brainstorm
2. Organize: Rewrite and organize in a particular format
3. Transform: Fundamentally transforms materials into a “knowledge artifact”
4. Format: Reflect on presentation for dissemination and communication; formats material for sharing
5. Transmit: Share with colleagues, peers, ec.
6. Collaborate: All areas of the lesson can feature collaboration; alternatively, collaboration can review and react to others’ products

Full Presentation: Click Here

Selected Bibliography

“An Examination of How a Teacher’s Use of Digital Tools Empowers and Constrains Language Arts Instruction” Computers in the Schools, 31:316-338, 2014. Purpose: Case study to explore a language art teacher’s integration of computers and iPads

Nancy Frey, et al. “iPad Deployment in a Diverse Urban High School: A Formative Experiment” Reading and Writing Quarterly  31:2, 135-150
Take Away: Modification 1: Purchasing Online Content; Modification 2: Purchasing a LMSModification 3: Integrating Collaborative Learning Tasks

“Free for All: A Case Study Examining Implementation Factors of One-to-One Device Programs” Computers in the Schools, 30:359-377, 2013. Take Away: Saturation—Top-Down; Adopter-Diffusion—Bottom-Up

Models for iPad Integration

I've been thinking a lot about models for integrating technology (and particularly, iPads) in the classroom.

iPad Bootcamp has a neat breakdown of various models--check it out here.

I'm leafing through some things for the final few posts of the year--and I intend to follow up on this point soon!

Taking Stock: Student Feedback

In assessing the use--past, present, and future--of the iPad in the English classroom, I think it appropriate to conclude the year with a student survey.

I've constructed a survey using surveymonkey.com that allows for student feedback regarding ease of use, general engagement, particular engagement with various apps and websites, and suggestions for best use in the future.

My goal, in concluding the academic year with this survey, is to reflect on what worked best and what might be tweaked for next year's iPad English class.

The survey lives here now--I'll share this with my students next week, but I'd be glad for some feedback from the blogosphere on framing the questions and/or adding/deleting questions.

In this vein, I'm hoping to get some feedback that is useful from an insider/outsider's perspective--similar to this student's assessment of various technological media being used in the classroom.

UJA/Atid Hackathon: We Hacked the Siddur!

I was part of the Atid Hackathon last week--read all about it here!

My team's project, "Build-A-Siddur", tied for second place.

Recent Updates: Success of iPad Integration!

In what follows, I'll share some modest--and recent--uses of the iPad in the English classroom that highlight the streamlined and integrated use of certain apps over the last few months in my classroom!

• Interactive Photography: I created a Haiku discussion forum with multimedia integration. Students were tasked during class time to snap a picture with the iPad that represents a theme in a Shakespearean sonnet. Then, they uploaded the image directly to the discussion forum with a brief explanation. Finally, they commented on one another's responses. 

• Book Reviews: Students were tasked to present book reviews of independent reading assignments to one another using video presentation. Using their iPads, students took videos of themselves reviewing their books. They shared those videos with me and then I uploaded them to a single Haiku page. During class, students brought headphones, watched one another's reviews, and posted comments to one another's videos on a discussion board on the Haiku page. 

• Shakespeare Study: I ran my entire Shakespeare unit this semester with the complementary use of Shakespeare in Bits, a robust Shakespeare app. Students used the app for independent reading with guiding questions; they also used it as a complement during classroom review. The app is absolutely amazing: it has a full, original, and annotated text alongside real-time animation/dramatization.

• Vocabulary Instruction: My students have found Membean, a differentiated vocabulary learning system, to be an engaging method for vocabulary instruction. I've integrated this easily into regular iPad classroom use: students are expected to complete 30 minutes/week (on their own time) studying and reviewing new vocabulary words on Membean. During class, they are allowed a 10 minute refresh-session, after which they take a quiz generated via my release. (N.B. While Membean is not an app, it presents and runs like an app, and students need less than one minute of log-in and start time to start running a review session).