The smoothest 1 to 1 implementation ever!

Eric Hoffer once said “In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” This quote and other similar quotes are sometimes used to describe teachers who refuse to look toward the world of tomorrow.  It is a quote suitable to those who believe they have learned everything they need to know and are content to remain stagnant.  Unfortunately, the message of this quote will pass over those who would benefit from learning from it.  I am proud to say that the people I have been training aren't one of these teachers. They are educators. They have looked at the possibilities and have risen to the task of providing a 21st century learning experience for our students.

The have accepted the challenge (to themselves as well as their students) to equip our learners to be prepared to use technology as a tool for learning and communicating. I have worked with many educators over the years that just wanted to work their schedule and forget about the rest. They have no inclination for learning and no interest in expanding their personal horizons. Luckily this is not the case in my school. These educators may sometimes be trepidecious about trying something new, but they do try and they do their best to enter a project with an open mind.

As I sit in the back of a classroom watching educators and students work together to use their iPads, I am simply amazed and thrilled that everyone (teacher and student alike) are comfortable with the equipment and quickly grasp the variety of ways they can use the iPads to share thoughts, files and other forms of information. Within the first few days of school these 10 and 11 year old kids are creating digital journals, using pdf annotators, creating voice threads and participating in digital discussions. With a grace that usually takes us adults a while to master, these students smoothly settle into a world of digital and blended learning. I see students taking control of the class by projecting their own iPads to the front screen (using the apple TV) and sharing their screens with the rest of the class. In the time it may take to have 2 or 3 students physically go to the front of the room, 5 different students may have taken over the screen to share their stuff.  I see educators encouraging students to participate in classroom digital discussions and different ways of learning experiencing different information.

During one class, as I sit in the back of the room, the educator guides the students in creating a digital notebook they will be using throughout the year.  They discussed all of the different ways they can keep information in the notebook and it's different features.  When the educator got stuck trying to remember how to add another page to this new notebook, I jumped in to help.  I should have sat there and allowed the kids to take over.  After showing how I would add a second page, one student looked at me like I car crazy!  Then he states..."Mr. Thomas, just do this." and in a single tap on the screen he produced a new page.  (my way took 3 taps)  I love it when I learn new things!

This is just a sample of what I saw the first week of school.  I have implemented several projects over the years and I have never had one go as smoothly and as strongly as this one.  It is also the only one where I have had the opportunity to thoroughly work with a staff who is interested in learning.  I work with an administrator who believes in professional development for educators and I work with a headmaster who believes in me enough to support technology goals in a variety of ways.  THAT is a winning combination.  I don't care how much money you have to work with (I'm fortunate in that regard, but I also have budgetary restrictions), if you don't have an administration AND a staff willing to collaborate and learn, you are waisting your time.  A strong team today results in amazing learners and leaders tomorrow.

Location:E Shea Blvd,Phoenix,United States

The Students Begin

Ok, we have learned about the iPad and practiced several apps. We have excelled in some areas and are holding our breath in others. We know there will be issues we didn't foresee, but we are also ready to deal with those issues.

It's 8:30 and the students have arrived. I have set my schedule to follow groups of students around to help as many educators throughout the day as I can. (This is where being a small school has it's advantages) It's go time. The entire Middle School has an all school assembly and then breaks into a modified schedule where they will spend three days learning expectations, procedures etc... Again, this type of thing takes a bit of time at the beginning of they year, but reduces issues all year long.

I sit in the back of the room during the first class of the day. I know most of this class time will be spent on basic procedures that do not include technology, but I need to make sure that when they do discuss and practice technology procedures I am there and available to help ensure things go smoothly. This class runs more smoothly that I could have ever expected. The students had spent some time with their iPads and quickly became familiar with the first app they had to use (class organizer). As I followed students around throughout the day I discovered this to be the case for everything they had to use on their iPads. I could not have asked for a better start to the school year! Now let's talk about the teachers.
Some of the teachers I taught over the summer were sold on the concept of 1 to 1 iPads from the moment I mentioned it. Some....well....not so much. Some were concerned about their own comfort level and skills in using technology. One educator left us two weeks before students started, so one person was new to everything, but she has done an awesome job!

As I followed these students I observed the educators and (as I expected) some asked me to teach the iPad part and some attempted to teach it on their own. In the first case, the educator watched closely and was able to be independent during the next class. In the second, I jumped in when I thought the educator was about to make a mistake or to clarify a concept. In this case, the educator paid close attention and corrected any issues with the next course. I could not be more proud of these educators. They have accepted my ideas, they have held difficult discussions about procedures and they have stepped outside of their individual comfort zones. All of this work has made a world of difference, not only in their ability to teach the students how to use the iPad, but in their demeanor in using the iPad as a teaching tool.

Location:N 39th St,Phoenix,United States

The Parent/Student Meeting

On important step we decided to take was to spend time with the students and parents together. During the standard orientation to the school an hour was set aside for me to teach students and parents. I love stuff like that!

I am in a room packed with people all wondering what I was going to say. We spent time going through the equipment and the expectations. We discussed that the primary and most important use of iPads in our classrooms is for learning. Everything else comes in a far second. The students and parents alike were ecstatic to get their equipment and ready to sign the Technology Acceptable Use Policy.

One important thing to note about this meeting is that all of the educators attended it as well as the parents and students. Since everyone was together, there should be less confusion and the educators have heard what I have to say. Since the educators heard what I said to parents and students, they can support our guidelines and are less likely to give a parent bad information.

Since I had a captive audience, I also introduced the parents and students to our online parent/student portal as well as our digital classroom environment. They aren't iPad specific, but all of our technologies are integrated into a single way to teaching and learning. They are not separate entities that function by themselves.

Now he just wait for the first day of school for students. So we hurry up and wait.

Location:N 39th St,Phoenix,United States

The iPad Adventure Day 4

This day is the final challenge for my educators. I believe in having educators experience technology (and many things) through the eyes of their students. They are asked to expand their horizons and step out of their comfort zones. My educators will use their time today to create movies using the iMovie iPad app, create comic books using the Comic Life app, creating videos using Explain Everything and many other activities. This is their chance to take what we have discussed and gain some hands on experience.

We spent a couple of hours discussing the first days of school. Where will Randy be located throughout the day? How will we deal with the unexpected? How will we communicate ideas with each other and our students? Who will teach which apps? This is not the most exciting conversation we have ever had, but if we want a smooth implementation, it is VERY important.

My educators did a wonderful job! They asked questions, got frustrated and figured out how to do things themselves. How wonderful! This is all I have to say for this day as most of the initial learning was completed during days 1 through 3. I can't wait to see what the first day of school brings!

Location:E Doubletree Ranch Rd,Paradise Valley,United States

The iPad Adventure Day 3

The iPad Adventure Day 3

It's the evening of the second day and I'm a bit tired, but full of determination to find a way to make things work the way we want them to.  I finally conceded that Remarks may not be the solution we need, so I went on the hunt.  I downloaded 16 pdf annotator apps that looked promising and began to experiment.  It's a good thing I am stubborn, because it was app number 16 that solved my issues.  Allow me introduce to you the app DocAS.  (on a side note, I'd love to find a really cool way to pronounce the name of this app)  DocAs is perfect for us!  This app is awesome!  Students can arrange their pdf files from teachers into folders, annotate them and share the finished document directly with the student/teacher folder for the course.  How awesome is that?!?  I was a little nervous at changing apps at this point (I didn't want to end up swinging from the rafters), but once I demonstrated the app to the educators, they liked it as well.  Pdf annotator issues...resolved!!!!  Now it's on to our classroom management system.  My staff had asked questions about quizzes and our classroom management system, so I allowed them to take this path for a while.  Since it isn't directly iPad related I'll skip that part of our morning.

The last of the large hurdles is the student planner.  We had decided on a student planner several months ago and it was time to teach it.  When we started this part of our day I announced that we could review more options if anyone was interested.  (this is when I should have been afraid, let's just say they weren't interested)  So we went through how to use the app ClassOrganizer.  We aren't using some of the features available in this app for our fifth grade students, be we felt the app was easy enough to use that it was still worth the cost ($2.49 USD education cost over 20 units).  We could have removed the need for PaperDesk and used Class Organizer as the students note taking tool, but felt it was a little less user friendly for an 11 or 12 year old.(our Upper School students may use it though).  Teaching the app itself took about 10 minutes.  Coming to agreement on consistency between courses took a bit longer, but we got it done.  I am very pleased with this turn out.  We take a much needed lunch hour(ish) and return for a fun filled afternoon of Socrative and iMovie.

Have you ever taught a group of teachers how to use iMovie?  Oh my.  It took me about 10-15 minutes to teach the iMovie interface to my group of educators.  iMovie on the iPad is so simple and fun to use they were off to the races in no time.  It took me about 10-15 minutes to get them to record themselves.  (for people that spend their lives in front of an audience, they sure do hate to get recorded)  I must say, even my least tech savvy educator (who REALLY didn't want to do a movie) managed to make a simple three scene video with very little extra assistance from myself or another educator.

Finally I taught them the app Socrative.  Just like comic books and interactive whiteboards, there are a variety of options when selecting a class survey/quiz tool.  I also made the decision for my staff (I don't usually do this, but they seemed to want the guidance).  Socrative is fun to use, does everything we want and is free.  My educators took a short quiz I created, then each educator made a quiz and used the rest of us as guinea pigs.  They seem to understand and enjoy Socrative, so I guess I made the right choice.

I felt learning four apps was enough for one day, so I allowed the time to explore the app store in search of apps they may wish to use for their individual classes which I can then purchase through the Volume Purchasing Education Store.

To recap, we have learned the following apps so far this week:

iMovie
Socrative
DocAS
Remarks
Class Organizer
PaperDesk
Explain Everything
Office HD
Google Drive (app)
DropBox (app)
Comic Life

No wonder i'm tired.

Tomorrow is our final day as a group.  We will discuss who will teach which apps to the students and when.  We will also decide where I will be located the first few weeks of school (I have promised this 1 to 1 program my full and possibly undivided attention(yeah, right)).  After that nitty gritty I promised to not teach any new apps (well, maybe just one more) but I would organize them in a way where they will have the time to use some of the apps listed above again in order to become more comfortable with them.  Let's see how that works out!

The iPad Adventure Day 2

The iPad Adventure Day 2

So last night I worked and worked and worked.  First I tackled the notebook app.  We really liked PaperDesk and I struggled to find a way to keep it and make it what my educators wanted.(remember that we want all student files for a course to go into a specific Google Drive folder)  After messing around with it for an hour or so I had my aha moment (sometimes referred to as my duh moment).  We could use PaperDesk and have it automatically back up to DropBox (as much as possible we want files to automatically back up to the cloud for students). We could then use Office HD to move files for us.  Since Office HD would communicate with both Google Drive and DropBox we could simply use that to copy files from DropBox into the student/teacher share folder.  It could work like this:

Johnny keeps a Science journal for his Science class taught by Mrs. Beaker.  Mrs. Beaker says "Class, please send me copies of your journals so I can grade them."  In the old days Johnny would have freaked out because he knows that silly journal has to be somewhere.  Did he leave it in his locker?  Is it at home?  Did the dog eat it?  That night Mrs. Beaker would carry a stack of journals home, spread them out everywhere so she could go through them and accidentally leaves one behind the next day.  In the new way, Johnny turns on his iPad, opens the OfficeHD app and selects his DropBox account (where his automatic backup is stored).  He selects the pdf file his journal app created and sends a copy to the folder he shares with Mrs. Beaker.  Mrs. Beaker goes home and puts her feet up.  She can now explore the journals from her iPad, laptop or any other device she has that can connect to Google Drive (which is just about anything beyond a piece of paper and a pencil, but I hear they are working on it).  So, am I a genius or what?  Journaling app solved!

Now for the pdf annotator.  ugh.  As much as I love the app Remarks for my own personal use, it is not going well for our group share situation.  But, thanks to my ingenious duh moment with PaperDesk I thought I had our answer.  oops... How wrong I was.  Fast forward to school where I have just taken the staff through how the students can share the journals.  They are relatively happy and content with my resolution to this issue.  Next, we decide to use the same method for sharing pdf files out of Remarks.  As any good educator would, we tested things just to make sure.  We could indeed transfer the pdfs into Google Drive, but not the annotations.  Non of the hand writing, typing or drawing we added to the pdf files inside of Remarks would transfer.  How frustrating.  After an hour or so trying to manipulate this I had another idea.  What if the problem isn't with Remarks, what if it is with the iPad?  Soooooo, I'm off to my laptop.  I open Safari (yes, I'm a mac guy) and I open one of the shared pdf files.  Low and behold!  There are all of the annotations we couldn't see on the iPad!  At least the educators could use their laptops to grade files left for them through remarks.  They weren't thrilled, but accepted this and we moved on to other things.  (I was not convinced we had to accept this so of course at night....)

After all this stress I felt they needed and deserved a treat so I taught them something new and exciting!  I taught them how to make a comic book using Comic Life!  There are several comic book creation apps out there, but in my not so humble opinion, none of them provide anything near the quality and experience of Comic Life.  I provided an example of a simple comic to the teachers and let them loose for about 30 minutes.  I'm not sure I've ever seen teachers so focused when it's not report card time.  They then used their iPads and projected their comics through the appleTV and yes, they exported them to DropBox in order to transfer to Google Drive in a pdf format just like students would.

Continuing with the concept of creating presentations without a Power Point type application, I had them create interactive presentations using Explain Everything.  There are, like comics, many different and good digital whiteboards out there, but Explain Everything had the features we really liked.  It could save to and load from DropBox, you could create videos and share them (using your Google Apps account) on YouTube.  (guidelines for sharing to YouTube is another discussion all by itself) or they could create a multiple slide presentation similar to a PowerPoint, but they can write on top of it, use a pointer tool or any of the other interactive whiteboard tools available in the app.  Although the interface is less user friendly to younger students, the robust features and powerful potential made it worth taking the time to teach the students(and teachers) how to use it.


And there's the day.  My staff had a success, a challenge and some fun while learning something new.  Tonight, I finally solve the pdf annotator issue.

The iPad Adventure Day 1

The iPad Adventure Day 1

Ok, so day day one was a couple of days ago, but here's the run down.  I had the clever idea that my staff would feel more relaxed if I put food out.  I thought "How could they get nervous and uptight if they are busy staying away from mini candy bars and cookies?"  I could not have been more wrong.  Ouch!  We knew the first thing we had to do was decide on the best apps for what we wanted to do.  We started with the basic word processing, excel and ppt.  I know what you are thinking.  Why didn't we just use Google Docs?  In the world of laptops I would agree completely and we have used Google Apps for a few years, but I wasn't happy with how smoothly Google Docs worked on the iPads and neither was my staff.

I knew we would want to use something more robust and user friendly than the standard Google Docs interface on the iPad so I first turned to CloudOn.  CloudOn is a great office type tool for the iPad. If you are using DropBox as your storage I continue to suggest CloudOn for text documents and spreadsheets (not so much for presentations).  Unfortunately, when connected to the new Google Drive (Docs is now Drive) it would sometimes make duplicates of the file instead of a smooth sync.  (on a side note, I have discovered that DropBox (in general) has a smoother syncing experience than Google Drive)  Next we turned to the app OfficeHD.  Not only could we connect multiple Google Drive accounts as well as DropBox accounts onto the single app, we could use OfficeHD as a pivot point and share documents between DropBox and Google Drive!  So we chose OfficeHD for our official office type product.

With this done, I thought I was in the clear and could start to breath (that first decision took us a while) so now it's on to journals.  Instead of having each child have a separate spiral bound notebook for each class (how 90's) it seemed appropriate to supply the iPads with a journaling app.  We originally decided to use PaperDesk for this purpose due to it's simple user interface, and it's ability to auto-sync to DropBox.  Unfortunately my educators had decided that as much as humanly possible they wanted all of the student apps to sync with Google Drive.  (each student will create a share folder with each educator giving them their own individual link to their teacher and a place to turn in their homework)  So the search began, but in the end we didn't find anything we liked as well and tabled the discussion so I could explore our options that night.  At this point my educators were getting stressed and trying to solve detailed questions about how things would work without understand the big picture so I had to stop them and force the candy on them (I knew that had to help at some point).

Finally, the pdf app.  This was a doozy.  We wanted the ability to share pdf files with our students in our learning management system (Fronter) and instead of having the students print them out and fill them in, we wanted to (as much as possible) keep them digital.  (this has taken up most of our time)  We started with an app that I love and have used often called Remarks.  Remarks allows students to draw, type, annotate and all kinds of things to a pdf file and you can set it to automatically update to DropBox.  Sweet!  Awesome!  But my people want it all in Google Drive.  GGGGGRRRRRRR.  Foiled again!  Ok, at this point I stop the conversations.  We are going in circles and I'm concerned that my staff is going to freak out a bit so I send them on a break.  Breaks are good, it helps people decompress and process.

After the break I had us leave the journal and pdf annotator discussion behind and we discussed presentation apps.  I am a believer in concepts such the Universal Design for Learning which, in very basic terms, states that students should be given the options to present what they know in a way that fits that child.  It may be a speech, a video, a poster, a book or standing on their head balancing tea cups on their left foot.  If they can demonstrate they have learned the objective, they are good to go.  Sooooooo, we need a variety of apps (and I wanted to make sure we all had the discussion of allowing different options with my staff).  So of course we looked at OfficeHD's PowerPoint, then I showed them some other options.  This was a relaxed discussion about the different options we can use on the iPad for presentations.  So we ended our day by playing with new apps without a specific agenda.

This day would have gone easier if I would have simply chosen the apps for the educators to use.  I could have dictated what apps were used, how they were used and how students would share files with educators, but I don't believe that would be appropriate.  I also believe I would have made some poor decisions.  I know a lot more now about what goes on in their classrooms than I did back in the spring. Now that I have a more thorough understanding of the workings of the different classrooms, I am able to guide my staff better in choosing technologies and can offer better advice when they seek me out.  I also believe that the technology department in a school should not dictate the technology in a classroom.  Too many classrooms are limited in their technology by the rules and regulations of the technology department.  Too many times a teacher is told they may not do something that is educationally valid because the technology department forbids it.  I take the reverse approach.  I work with my staff and design my department (I'm using the term department very loosely here) around the desires of the teachers and the movement of technology in education as a whole.  So our first day was frustrating, it was long and I really need a nap.  But, because we went through this process today, the school year will run much more smoothly and most importantly, our students will be given better opportunities to learn.

Next up:  annotate, annotate, annotate, pop quiz!