It happens. iPads freeze up and become completely unresponsive. The screen doesn’t respond; the home button doesn’t work; the sleep button doesn’t work; holding down the sleep button to power down doesn’t work. Now what?
A hard reset.
To perform a hard reset hold down the Sleep and Home buttons simultaneously (like you do for a screenshot, but hold them down) for about 10 seconds. If the swipe to power down option comes up, ignore it and keep holding the two buttons down. After about 10 seconds the iPad will power down and reboot (you’ll see the Apple logo when this happens). This is the equivalent of holding down the power button on a desktop/laptop to force a power down when they freeze.
Needing to perform a hard reset on an iPad (or iPhone) should be a very rare occurrence, but it’s a good trick to know.
There are lots of reasons why people are excited about iOS 7. But the new timer has got to be one of the best upgrades. I know what you’re thinking, “it’s just a timer.” But it’s so much better now – for three reasons.
1. It’s visual.
As teachers we use timers with our students all the time. The new iOS 7 timer not only counts down, it has a red bar that makes its way around a circle as time passes. One trip around the circle, the time is up. Halfway through your timer? Halfway around the circle. The longer the timer, the slower the movement of the red bar. It’s great for those visual students who need to see how much time they have left.
2. It’s easy to find.
It’s accessible through the control center. A quick swipe and a tap and you’re there, ready to set it. No more going back to the home screen to find the clock app. And from the Control Center, it doesn’t just bring you to the clock app; it brings you straight to the timer!
3. You can see it from the lock screen.
This is really the best. When you’re at the lock screen, your timer is right there counting down (where you want it). No longer are the days of having to unlock your iPad (or iPhone) just to check on a timer. iOS 7 has a lot of new features. Don’t overlook the new timer.
I want a blog, but I have 6 classes (periods). Do I have to have six blogs?
I have a classroom blog, but I have a different group of students for reading; how do post just for my reading families?
Labels! Each blogger post comes equipped with the ability to give it one or more labels: such as “Period4” or “reading.” The options for adding labels are on the right when you’re composing a new post (the red arrow below). When the post is published, the labels will appear at the bottom of the post. Labels are a great way to sort blog posts into categories.
Also notice that when you’re composing, the labels you’ve used before show up in blue and you can just click on them and they’ll be added to the post (the green arrow above).
Now posting with labels is all well and good, but what if you want a user to easily be able to find a bunch of posts with a particular label? How do those fourth period students easily access only their “Period4” posts?
One way is to scroll through the posts looking for one that is labeled “Period4” (red arrow above). That label will be hyperlinked, and if you click on the label you’ll get a page with only posts containing that label. This will certainly work, but it means asking your users to scroll down your blog posts looking for a specific label. This could be time-consuming. Fortunately, there’s a better way.
From your Blogger Dashboard, navigate to the Layout screen. Along the right sidebar or the top (your choice) you can add a “gadget.” When the select gadget window pops up (pictured below), select the Labels gadget (you’ll have to scroll down to find it).
Once you’ve selected the Labels gadget you’ll be given some options. Do you want to show all your labels, or just some of them? How do you want them sorted? Should they be formatted as a list or as a cloud? Should it show the number of posts per label? Once you’re set, Save it and you’re ready to go.
Now, head back to your live blog and your labels will be there for easy access. And remember, each post can have more that one label. So if you have information for more than one class, give that post multiple labels and it will show up in more than one label category.
Users can now easily click on a specific label and get access to just that content.
It happens like this: The last few times you’ve used an app with your students they’ve all done very well… except one. You find the student makes poor decisions and finds his or her way into another app to play around. You could take the iPad away, but then the student can’t do what you need them to do. If only you could walk away and be sure they’d stay on task (or at least in the correct app). You can.
Guided Access allows you to temporarily lock the device in a specific app, and even disable part of the screen (so students can’t access a menu and navigate somewhere else).
In the Settings app, tap on General on the left, and then Accessibility near the bottom of the right-hand pane.
In Accessibility look for Learning: Guided Access.
Here, you can turn on Guided Access and set a passcode (a four-digit number).
Now, with Guided Access on you’ll get a menu when you triple-tap the home button from within an app. This will give you options to turn off the Home button, disable the touch screen, or lock the device rotation (red arrows). You can also drag to create greyed out areas of the screen to disable specific menu items before tapping Start to activate Guided Access (yellow arrows).
When Guided Access is activated triple-tapping the home button brings up a passcode prompt for you to disable Guided Access and return to normal functioning.
So, to help keep a student on task or confidently (and safely) share your teacher iPad with a student, consider Guided Access.
UPDATE:
You can also add a timer when you enable Guided Access.
Guided Access timer.
When the time runs out the iPad stops working and asks for the guided access password. This could be used to say to a student, “if you work on ________ for __ minutes, you can have this incentive” or “if you can __________, then as a reward you can spend __ minutes with the __________ app.” In either case, you don’t need to be the one watching the clock – Guided Access will take care of that for you.
Okay, I admit it. I make mistakes. And I love the “undo” command. You know, command+z in OS X and ctrl+z in Windows.
And if you’ve ever worked with kids you know they make mistakes too. There they are, writing away when somehow they manage to select a paragraph or two (or maybe they “select all”) and accidentally bump the delete key… oops.
Some text…
Selected…
And deleted…
Oh no. This is an iPad; there’s no command+z. But… there is an undo button. With the traditional keyboard up, tap the “.?123” button to bring up the secondary keyboard. There, on the left is the “undo” button.
Google Drive and Pages both have their own undo buttons (up top on the left, did you notice those in the screenshots?) but this works everywhere. Evernote, Notes, etc. Anywhere you enter text.
So, the next time your students lose a paragraph of work (or more), you can help them get it back.
Sadly, the undo button is not present on the iPhone.
For those out there that noticed the Lorem Ipsum text in the screenshots, the Veggie Ipsum generator I used is here. For the meat-lovers, try Bacon Ipsum.
iPads are not teachers. And iPads won’t replace teachers. But if they could, they should; if a few hundred dollars in hardware can do the same job I do, then I should be replaced. But iPads don’t teach, they support.
iPads are also not about teaching core skills. Sure, there are some skill building apps out there that both my students and I love, but the iPad’s power is in creative creation. It’s power is giving an extensive toolbox to students as they try to show us what they’ve learned. And there isn’t an individual app that will do that (and that’s okay).
About a year ago I first heard Greg Kulowiec of EdTechTeacher talk about App Smashing. App Smashing is the process of using multiple apps together to create a single product. The power of the iPad isn’t about one or two innovative apps. It’s about finding creative ways to get apps to work together (smashing them together to get something new).
Drawing Pad does some cool stuff. So does Chrome. So does Explain Everything. So does iMovie. So does Book Creator. But all of them have their own limitations. Each of them lack some really creative features. But at the same time, each of them does some amazing things the others don’t. The power of the iPad is in getting those apps to work together to do some truly creative stuff.
Students can grab pictures from web in Chrome (properly cited, of course) and put them in the Camera Roll. Students can then pull those images into drawing pad and annotate them, sending the updated version back to the camera roll. Students can pull those newly-updated images into Explain Everything to add motion or overlay speech. They can bring those images into iMovie or Boook Creator. And then they can move the final product to Dropbox or Drive to share them with the world.
Apps Smashed in this illustration: Chrome, Camera Roll, Drawing Pad.
In App Smashing, the ipad’s Camera Roll is that central hub. There isn’t a traditional file structure on iOS devices, but the camera roll serves as a place to store/access/transfer images and movies.
Granted, most of the apps I’ve mentioned cost a few bucks each. And no doubt there are free apps that will do similar things. But in many cases what that price tag gives you is the ability to share content across apps. If you want to just play around and keep creative content within a single app you can probably find a free way to do that. If you want to truly leverage the power of the iPad and share content across apps, that may cost you $1.99. But it’s well worth it.
There isn’t an app for that. But there are 3 or 4 that if you use together you can do some pretty amazing stuff.
The end of the elementary school year brings with it the tradition of having students write letters to the teacher they’ll have the following year. Depending on the school, kids may know who their teacher is and they may not. As a teacher I’ve always enjoyed getting them, but not having a visual of each student made it difficult for me to match letters with kids.
This past year, with a cart full of iPads, I decided to change things up a little. Using the iMovie trailer function, I would have students create trailers about themselves and I would send those movies up to fourth grade.
We started by talking about trailers and what they were for. All my students had seen them on TV and in the theaters. And a few even knew they were called trailers. From there we quickly previewed the trailer themes in iMovie. We then got the iPads out and kids got to spend more time looking at each trailer theme to choose the on that best fit them. I did have to spend some time explaining that the music and the text font were all they were going to keep; the content of the trailer would be completely rewritten by them.
The students made their trailer theme choices and were ready to go, but I wasn’t. I’m all about getting technology in the hands of kids, but something about giving a bunch of cameras (iPads) to kids without any concrete plans seemed like a recipe for disaster. Enter storyboards.
Each trailer has its own unique set up, its own order of text and camera shots mixed together, so this was a little tricky. I found that teachingparadox.edublogs.org had put together a bunch of iMovie trailer storyboards in 2012 (now it seems the entire blog has been deleted). Since then, new trailer themes have been introduced so I needed to put together a few more with a similar format (links to all the storyboards are at the end of the post).
With storyboards in hand, students decided on the text they’d use and the shots that would support that. Then, and only then, with a plan written down and in-hand (and approved by me), did they start filming.
This was the fun part for me. I got to sit back and watch them create, watch them say “this is who I am.” We did shooting both inside and outside. I did minimal troubleshooting and I think only helped one or two kids shoot – they were happy to create ad hoc groups to help each other with particular scenes.
When the trailers were done, students sent them to the Camera Roll and then up to out classroom Dropbox account. From there I was able to put them on the network server for the fourth grade teachers and share them with parents. We also gave students the opportunity to share their video with the class (they loved that part, seeing them on the projector screen with audio coming through the classroom speakers).
The project was a huge success and proved to be a great way to engage kids during that final week and half of school when the students are all but checked out.
Storyboards:
TeachingParadox storyboards: The file contains storyboards for the Superhero, Bollywood, Expedition, Fairy Tale, Narrative, Retro, Romance, Scary, and Swashbuckler trailer. All nine are in the same PDF, here.
In January I read a blog post by Bill Powers about Daniel Pink‘s “Pronoun Test” from his book Drive. Basically, the Pronoun Test is about listening to employees talk about their organization and focusing on whether they refer to the organization as “we” or “they.” Mr. Powers wrote excitedly that his school was a “we” (our) school.
Over the past few months I’ve been kicking this idea of the Pronoun Test around in my head. I’ve decided that in education, the question of whether you work in a “we” or “they” organization isn’t that clear cut; it really depends on how you define “organization.” We have grade level or department teams that function like small organizations. We have schools level “organizations.” We have districts. We have Departments of Education at the state and national level. As educators, we aren’t just part of one “organization,” we’re part of many tiered organizations.
At the grade or department level we are (or at least I certainly hope are) working with a “we” organization. And with the recent NCLB and RTTT legislation I know a lot of educators see the US Department of Education as a “they.”
Somewhere between the grade level and the USDOE, the “we” becomes a “they.” Is your school a “we” or a “they”? What about your district? Your state Department of Education?
Somewhere things go from being done with you to to you.
Many classrooms these days are looking to make the technology in their classrooms seamless, a standard part of what they do. This is great. Our students live in an environment where they use technology outside school all the time and to keep it out of their hands at school would be doing them a huge disservice. However, it’s important to remember what it means to have technology be seamless, and truly a standard part of what we do.
Pencils are used seamlessly in schools. They are available to students when they want them. The students know how to use them safely. And the adults don’t take them away (unless, of course, the students are using the pencils in an unsafe manner). And of course, no matter how poorly a student may have behaved in one subject, it would be unheard of to then take away his/her pencil for another subject.
But in too many classrooms where we are trying to integrate technology, our mindset isn’t quite where it needs to be. If we truly believe that we want to seamlessly integrate technology, then we can never use it as a behavioral carrot. If the plans are to use iPads (or any other piece of technology) in math, then no matter how poor student decisions were earlier in the day the iPads have to come out in math.
We can no longer say, “Well, you didn’t listen well in that last lesson, so we’re not going to use [insert shiny technology] this afternoon.” Would we ever catch ourselves saying “Well, you didn’t listen well in that last lesson, so we’re not going to use pencils this afternoon”? Or lined paper? Or pattern blocks? No, that would be absurd.
Technology cannot be a carrot. It can’t be a behavioral bribe. If we truly believe technology is a core part of what we do, then we can’t take it away (unless students are using it inappropriately).
Last weekend I had the pleasure attending Playdate Boston, the latest iteration of educators redefining professional development to make it more useful for thm. The premise of a Playdate is that in most professional development sessions you hear about all these new fantastic tools, but don’t get the time to actually play with them and figure out how they will (or won’t) fit into you professional life. Playdate was a time to bring educators together to do just that.
Each playdate session had (loosely) four parts:
A quick intro the the topic of the session.
A quick discussion about what a teacher could do with the tool. How to use it with kids, roadblocks, etc.
Time to play!
A quick debrief.
The day ended with a Slam where participants shared what they’d learned, allowing us to hear about the sessions we didn’t attend. Collaborative notes from the Slam are here.
A few days out, this is what has stuck in my mind (in no particular order):
Playdates are fun. Educators need more of these.
Explain Everything. I need to spend more time with this app – and by that I mean my students need to spend more time with it. The last couple updates have made the app explode. Embedded browsers, that are live during recording blew me away. It really is such a versatile tool for allowing students to show their learning.
Bump is a much better way for my students to get content from one iPad to another. In the past we’ve used a shared classroom Dropbox account. Bump will do this more easily.
Workflow idea. Every Evernote account has a dedicated email address so you can email directly into the account (or to a specific notebook!). Put that email address in the contacts of student iPads so they can email their work directly to a teacher’s Evernote account.
iMovie (for the iPad). I (and my students) also need to spend more time with this app. It’s one-stop shopping for movies (shooting, selecting clips, editing, publishing, sharing). Learned about one downside of the app allowing you to not save the unwanted clips – no material for a bloopers reel.
Discovery Education has clips in its library that are okay to reuse in student projects.
Symbaloo. This is cool, a visual way of curating links. I use a “Student Links” page on my classroom website, but I like the visual tile look of Symbaloo.
Image Dictionary is a Chrome extension that allows users to look up a word, but instead of getting a dictionary definition (which is often not terribly useful for a struggling reader) it produces a picture. Great for younger readers.
It happens. iPads freeze up and become completely unresponsive. The screen doesn’t respond; the home button doesn’t work; the sleep button doesn’t work; holding down the sleep button to power down doesn’t work. Now what?
We started by talking about trailers and what they were for. All my students had seen them on TV and in the theaters. And a few even knew they were called trailers. From there we quickly previewed the trailer themes in iMovie. We then got the iPads out and kids got to spend more time looking at each trailer theme to choose the on that best fit them. I did have to spend some time explaining that the music and the text font were all they were going to keep; the content of the trailer would be completely rewritten by them.
