Connected Learning

MOOC (Massively Open Online Course)
While our iPad groups may not be massive, or even a course, a lot of what we are trying to do is explained well in the video that follows. Please take a few minutes to watch it.

Some takeaways:

• You can find networks of people with the same interest(s). Participating in these networks is a powerful way to learn. 
• Due to the Internet, access to information and expertise is no longer the problem it used to be.
• Participation is important for any type of learning. Engagement is critical to learning.
• Formal courses offered by schools have significant barriers to entry (time, location, cost...) and thus may not be the easiest way to encourage life-long learning. Open networks have low barriers to entry. Open networks work well in rapidly changing times.
• In a MOOC, the work is accessible. One person's ideas can (should) illuminate others.
• MOOCs promote independent learning.

Why go 1:1 iPad?

Just a quick post on why some schools are using iPads across the school as a 1:1 program

Click on the link  for further information form one school's perpective.

Apple Leadership Tour :iPad Training

Apple Leadership Tour Wednesday 4.4.2012


A group of teachers from AISB ( Elementary, Middle and High) attended the event at the Sofitel yesterday and a had a great day learning with iPads and listening to some great speakers.  The event itself was a very slick and very professional Apple event.  We were each given an iPad 2 for the day with lots of content loaded.  I spent most of my free time writing down the apps I wanted to look and download.  This post will reflect on the many great apps we were shown and I will post about the keynote from Ewan McIntosh


The first speaker focused on a whistle stop tour of the iPad. Here are my highlights:


Why not use your iPad camera as a visualizer; so much cheaper.  You then have a much more powerful tool in the hands of teachers. So instead of buying a $700 visualizer, you could nearly have 2 iPads?


Vital signs A great app that could be used in science classes that uses the camera function to look at your vital signs.  Use it in PE to show the increase in heart rate after an exercise in class.


Power of Minus Ten Cells and Genetics A great app. I'm not a scientist but it may make your science lessons interesting and bring the content alive.


Pocket Body  great look into the human body but maybe not for younger kids.  It's expensive but would be interesting for biology lessons I'm sure and its cheaper than a skeleton.  You would  only need maybe one of these apps on a teachers iPad to demo this. The video below will be give a better demo.

Video physics PE and science lessons mix, or take a video of angry birds and plot the speed of the bird? 


Also use iPhone apps on the iPad why not use story cubes to help with language development or creative writing.  You shake the phone to come up with a range of cubes and then get the students to use these as prompts in story development.  Great fun.


Comic life This a brilliant app that I have used with all ages in secondary and is heavily used in elementary schools.  What I really like about this is that you can use your content you have taken with camera and just add this to your comic as you build your work.


Explain Everything no need for an interactive whiteboard.  A great app for saving what you show in class or record before a lesson to demo some aspect of a lesson. I'm probably not doing this app justice as we need to test this with a Apple TV and projector or a large flat screen TV.  This would open up more possibilities for sharing content from an iPad in classroom. 


Below is a list of apps that I would like to explore further and if we were to have  a 1:1 iPad  program or BYOD program then these should be recommended for students to have.  


iFiles way to share your files in the cloud using WebDAV


iHomework 


pages keynote iBrainstorm wolfram Alpha  i a writer word wit algebra touch math board 


statsmate HD Soulver Sketchbook Pro bookcreator creative book builder solar system 

instacast HD penultimate quickoffice HD  






Part 2 will look at iBooks author and Ewan McIntosh's keynote about problem finding and design thinking.


We had a quick tour of iBooks author and how we could set up a book.  This is main aim for now until the end of the school year is to set up a book with a teacher and get this published on the book store.  Unfortunately we cannot set up a course on iTunes U yet as we cannot set up accounts for this region.  Watch this space I will want to keep bugging apple until we can do this.  Please check out this course.  ( Open this link on your ipad in safari). We could potentially use this as a way of delivering our curriculum; an end to moodle :).




The great thing about iBooks author is the ability to create multimedia widgets.  This site is  allows you to make more of your own widgets classwidgets.com 


Another way of making e-publishing information is using the following site dotepub.com 

The final Keynote of the day was presented by Ewan McIntosh @ewanmcintosh.

I will try to give a brief summary of his excellent and really thought provoking keynote.


Ewan focused on his work that he is doing with problem finding and design learning.  His website has many examples of the work he is doing all over the world.  Some of his ideas where very similar to my thinking when I taught MYP technology in my last school in Vienna.  


To try and make learning focused on the three R's; Responsibility, Respect, Real things and the three C's Choice, Challenge and Collaboration.  To try and make the learning have a STAR ( Something They'll Always Remember ) moment.  This can be very difficult to achieve as there is certain content that you have to deliver to cover the IB curriculum.  So the real challenge for the teachers is to try and cover the content but then make sure you have real and challenging work that shows the whole picture to the student.  How to do this will be a continued discussion which we started on the way home on the metro, tram and in the car :)


I think Ewan can explain it all better here or below.

A great day and lots of great food as well. Thanks to Apple.

Nabit App

Any chance of this being useful for phys ed class? Dance?

More on PLNs

Some more on personal learning networks (or professional learning networks, if you prefer).

And some links from today's meeting:

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