Tag: ipad

65/365 Talking about Tools Needs More Space Than Gateway Posts

This post from edtechteacher came through twitter the other day, and I clicked on it for a number of reasons. I’m teaching a class on social media right now, so that was a draw. I’m working with student teachers and on the lookout for new tools that will help them with tech in their practice, so that was a draw. I own an iPad and want to feel like I’m getting the most out of my investment, so that was a draw.

The biggest draw? It was what I call a gateway post. I knew from the post title it was going to be bulleted (or some version thereof), it was going to have shiny tools, and it wasn’t going to bog me down in things like theory and considerations of the tools’ deeper implications for learning. (Such a drag, right?)

As I was reading, I noted David Bill was online, so I sent him the link. He scanned it, and a deeper conversation of this type of gateway posts entailed. Here are some problems and possible answers/next questions that came out of the conversation:

Issue 1: David made a good point that this post dredges up worries about the foisting of iPads on classrooms without teacher input or training.

If we know anything about the “new” and the “shiny” in education (tech or not), we know that it’s done with little input beyond a committee’s decision and compulsory trainings for the teachers who are going to have to pick up the New Shiny in the next teaching cycle. Sadly, these trainings are rarely based on teacher questions or welcoming of those questions.

Issue 2: The iPads/tablets are coming. They just are. Whether through mechanisms described above or more democratic means, more teachers are going to see these machines in their classrooms.

If I’m a teacher who knows iPads are headed to my classroom and I’m not comfortable with that thought, this post can be a strong gateway to helping me figure out what I can do in the first few weeks/months to make the machines do things that are helpful for students. That can make the difference between games, word processing, and wikipedia being the only tools used on the tablets and kids starting to see the machines a über-mobile creation tools.

Issue 3: We can’t stop there. Gateway posts can have a terminal effect. Teachers with little time or space in their schedules to play with new ideas will thereby not play with new ideas. They will bookmark the tool page or put the tools mentioned into the same lesson plans they’ve been using for years and that will be that, because tech will seem like “Another thing I’ll never get to.

Gateway posts need follow-up posts. Individual tools need their own space like this piece on Evernote from LifeHacker. Tools need to be situated in the ways they have helped practitioners expand their practices. Context, goals, affordances, constraints, reflections, next steps can inspire conversations and thoughtfulness that is missing in gateway posts.

So, I’ve challenged David to take each of the tools mentioned in the edtechteacher post and give each its own post on his blog, to help teachers see more deeply into their possible implementation and to start the better forms of the conversations.

Gateway posts have their place. They act as resplendent repositories of resources to which we can turn in professional development sessions, lesson planning, conference presentations, etc. They should not be the norm of our expectations for conversations around how we can think about the New Shiny in classrooms, schools and other learning spaces.

Things I Know 236 of 365: They haven’t built an app that can hold my math notes!

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

– John Louis von Neumann

The proper iPad app for taking notes in math doesn’t yet exist. I’ve been researching the available options for the last few months. I’ve tried Evernote and PaperDesk. I’ve used Notes and checked out NotesPlus. Still nothing does what I want it to.

For notes in every other class, for study group messages, annotating readings and finding ancillary sources, I’ve a great workflow. Evernote, GoodReader, Google Docs and Safari all get the job done quite nicely.

For math, though, I’m still stuck.

It occurred to me yesterday that the problem might lie in the fact that every app I’ve investigated thus far is imitating rather than innovating. Every one of them wants to be paper — plus a little something extra.

They all start from the paradigm of an actual pad of paper and ask, “What have people always wanted their notebooks and legal pads to do?” From there, each app works to add on. Maybe the additions create a watered down legal pad or maybe the iPad only looks like a notebook. Either way nothing yet strikes me as approaching the problem from a new way.

I saw this video yesterday and thought, “My iPad can’t do that.” I know I can install iMovie and import images, but the kind of free-form playing Vi Hart showcases in her video isn’t possible on my iPad. It should be, though, right?

I, along with any other math student working on an iPad, should have an infinite white board at our disposal with the ability to call up the most complex calculator possible and then copy and paste the order of computations onto the white board so we can annotate what we’ve done. Think an infinite Prezi with the ability to bookmark according to dates and key terms. I want to teraform a white board into a world of mathematics, map it out and then use my iPad as the window through which I visit and manipulate the world. Think of it as Sims meets Presi meets the best parts of Super Mario Bros. 2.

For now, I have a spiral-bound notebook for my math notes. Every other class and meeting is synced to the cloud and the notes and annotated readings from each can be emailed or linked out to friends, classmates and study group members. My math notes will live and die with my notebook — until someone builds something better. No, not better. Different.