iPad – Page 17 – Jonathan Wylie

The Goodreader iPad Workflow Solution

At a workshop today, I got talking to a High School teacher (@MrsMoses227) who uses the Goodreader app for her iPad workflow solution. It wasn’t a method I was previously familiar with, but it worked very well for her, so I thought I would share it here for anyone else that might be interested in following a similar path.

Goodreader, if you don’t already know, is a powerful PDF reader, but that is only half the story. It allows you to view almost any file type you can think of, watch movies from a variety of formats, and even unzip compressed folders. You can connect with numerous cloud accounts, copy, move, rename or transfer files, and send them to other apps. Finally, there is an intuitive number of annotation tools for marking up PDFs, and tabbed file viewing. So, you can see why it is often referred to as the Swiss Army knife of productivity apps on the iPad!

So, what did this teacher use it for? Well, she asks her students to email their assignments as a PDF. These emails go to her Google Apps Gmail account, which she can access through Goodreader, because Goodreader can also connect to a variety of email servers through POP or IMAP. The app doesn’t show all your emails, just those with attachments that Goodreader can view. She opens the students’ PDFs in Goodreader, annotates them accordingly to grade the paper, and emails them back to the students as a flattened copy, right from the Goodreader app.

As a workflow option, it is not necessarily all that new, because you can do very much the same thing with Notability and a shared Google Drive or Dropbox folder, but being able to collect the assignments right from her email, grade it, and return it all from the one app, is still a very efficient solution. You can even streamline it further by using Gmail filters to send each class’s assignments to a specific folder so you don’t have to worry about cleaning out your inbox afterwards.

Do you have a preferred iPad workflow for your students? What have you had the most success with and why?

Revisiting the One iPad Classroom: Resources

There has been a few things going around Twitter recently about the 1 iPad classroom, and for me it has been good timing. I will be visiting a school on Friday who asked me to give some tips and ideas about how to use only a handful of iPads in the classroom. Some have one, some have two or three, but none have any more than that. So, I thought that this would be a great time to revisit the 1 iPad classroom to discover the latest ideas and influences.

Too often, it is easy to get caught up in all the talk about 1:1 initiatives, or multiple iPad carts, when the reality for a lot of schools is quite the opposite. I myself ran a 4 iPod Touch classroom for a couple of years, so I remember the challenges of managing this, making sure all students have equal access to the technology, and trying to find ways to involve as many of the students as possible in meaningful learning activities. It’s not easy, but it can be done, and there are a lot of great ideas out there from those that do it on a daily basis.

So, in the interests of sharing, here are a number of useful blogs and websites that I came across while researching some ideas for the school I am visiting this week. Some you may have seen before, while some may be new, but all are great resources for educators in a 1 iPad classroom. What was interesting to me though, was that almost all of these resources are from elementary teachers. You don’t hear much about the 1 iPad Middle School classroom or the 1 iPad High School classroom. What does that say about the state of mobile technology in our schools today?

Regardless, I want to take the time to say thanks to all who took the time to create these resources for the benefit of others. Feel free to add any of your own favorites to the comments below.

Tips for the One iPad Classroom and a Free iPad Rules Download
One iPad in the Classroom? 10 Apps
The 1 iPad Classroom by Lisa Johnson and Yolanda Barker
The One iPad Classroom: Musings from EdTech Diva
Only 1 iPad in the Classroom? from the Literacy Journal blog
One iPad in the Classroom – Mark Anderson’s blog
One iPad in the Classroom – What Can you Do?
Less than a Class Set – Learning and Leading with Technology
The One iPad Classroom – Ideas from a second grade classroom
Ideas for the 1 iPad Art Room
The Single iPad Classroom – Elementary EdTech
One Music Class, One iPad, Now What?

iPads and Visually Impaired Students

The iPad has a host of great accessibility features that are built-in to help make the device more accessible for disadvantaged learners. However, today I was asked to think a little bit outside the box. I had a request from one of our consultants that was working with a teacher who wanted to link their iPad with a student’s iPad in real time.

The teacher wanted to annotate documents on her iPad and project them to the class so that they could see them on a larger screen. The trouble was that this still wasn’t large enough for her visually impaired student. So, what she really wanted, was a way to project her iPad to two places at the same time. The first was the wall for the whole class to see, the second was the iPad of the student with the visual impairment. That way, the student could get a close up view of what the teacher was doing in real time, and/or use pinch to zoom to get a better view of what the rest of the class was seeing. Easy right? 🙂

So, three of us sat down and put our heads together to try and figure this out. It didn’t sound easy, but surely, there must be some way of doing this. There was. Here’s how it works. The teacher links her computer with the student’s iPad via the free join.me service. This allows the student to view everything on the teacher’s computer, but not interact with it. We’ve done this in the past, and it works great with the join.me iPad app. However, this alone did not fix out problem. This does not get the image of the teacher’s iPad to the student’s iPad. To do that, we will use Reflection, or AirServer. [Kudos to my superstar supervisor, Stacy Behmer (@sbehmer), for suggesting the AirPlay link].

So, the teacher’s computer is linked to the student’s iPad with join.me. The teacher then projects her iPad to her computer with Reflection or AirServer. Because the image of the teacher’s iPad is now on her computer, the visually impaired student also has the image of the teacher’s iPad! Then all that is left is for the teacher to plug their projector into their computer, and voila!

So, there you go. It is possible to link two iPads together for a real time mirrored image. There is not really any chance for direct collaboration, but for this purpose, it was ideal, and it is yet another example of how the iPad is helping to break down barriers and increase accessibility for students in the classroom.

iPad SpEd Apps for Reading and Writing

Yesterday, I co-presented a workshop with a well respected colleague of mine on special education iPad apps that can be used for reading and writing. It was a one-day workshop that was well attended by local educators who were looking to further integrate the iPad into special education classrooms to help further Language Arts goals for their students.

We looked at text to speech apps, digital audio book apps, storytelling apps, test taking apps, note taking apps, handwriting apps, and more. There is a huge number of reading and writing apps for the iPad out there, so narrowing it down to a manageable number was quite the task! However, in my experience, being spoilt for choice is never a bad thing when it comes to good educational iPad apps. You can see the final list if you visit our workshop site.

I learned a lot from my research for this session, but if there was one thing I discovered a shortage of apps for, it was for apps that accurately and efficiently turn printed text into natural, spoken words. Students with reading difficulties need a reliable solution for this. VoiceOver and Speak Selection are great features in many circumstances, but they don’t work very well, if at all, with things like PDFs. (VoiceOver works but there is no way to pause or stop it once it starts, and it changes the touch interface controls on the device). Then there are the students who only have a printed textbook or novel. How can we make that text more accessible for those students with special needs?

There are apps we tried that claim to work in situations like this, but they only did so with mixed success. OCR apps are useful, but again not always as accurate as you might want, and they often involve extra steps or apps to complete the reading process. So, if there are any developers out there looking for a gap in the market, this might just be it. Educational publishers can help out too. What about HTML5 versions of online textbooks with built-in audio voiceovers? Shouldn’t these be available for free with every printed textbook a school buys? Yes please!

Do you have favorite reading or writing apps for special education students in a K-12 learning environment? Which ones do you like best and why?

Happi Papi App Evaluation Program for Schools

Educators looking for a way to discover new iPad apps…for free…might want to take a look at the Happi Papi App Evaluation Program for Schools.

Teachers who sign up get to test drive Happi Papi’s and other developer’s apps for free, in return for filling out a short evaluation survey that takes your feedback as an educator to help revise or improve further app development.

Once enrolled, you will get an email about once a week, offering you the chance to try a specific app. If you like the look of it, you simply click the link in the email to register your interest. You will then be send another email that gives you a redemption code that you can use in the App Store to get a free copy of the app.

After about two weeks you will be sent a link to a survey for the app you received. Completing the survey is not mandatory, but I think it is a great way of informing developers about the kind of features that educators like or dislike in an iPad app, and I am all for improving apps that are designed for the classroom.

I have had several apps since I signed up for the program. Some I thought were great, others less so, but that I always enjoy seeing what new ideas developers are coming out with and how they are looking to market their apps for the classroom. So, if you are interested, and have not already signed up, head on over to the Happi Papi Evaluation Program and give them your email address to get started.

InfuseLearning.com: Free Online Assessment Tool

InfuseLearning.com is a free online assessment tool that is designed to let educators make fast and easy formative or summative assessments of their students. It is a relatively new service, but one that is gathering support quickly due to its versatility and ease of use.

InfuseLearning is like a unique, virtual classroom that you and your students log in to. It lets you quiz your class on topics of your choice, and it records the students responses so that you can use the results to inform your teaching. Quizzes can be given in one of two ways. There are the quick fire questions that teachers can use for immediate feedback. (True/False, Multiple Choice, Sort and Order, Open Ended Text, Numeric or Likert Scale are all possible choices for this). The teacher would ask the question orally, or have it displayed at the front of the class, and students can respond on an internet enabled device. Responses are displayed in real-time on the teacher device.

The second option for teachers is to create a quiz ahead of time. Students can then complete it at their own pace, and all the questions and possible answers will be online and displayed on the device that the student is using to take the test. An added feature here, is the ability for the students to have the questions read aloud, or even translated into another language and then read aloud. This is a great feature for ELL students, but teachers can choose whether to enable or disable these features on a student by student basis when they create their own class. In this way, it can also be a very useful tool for MFL teachers.

However, my favorite feature of this free online assessment tool is the fact that it is a cross-platform site. This means that it is not device specific. It can be used on Macs, PCs, iPads, Andriod tablets, Chromebooks, or just about anything else with a modern web browser. So, InfuseLearning can be used in the classroom whether you are 1:1, BYOD, in a computer lab, or a classroom with a variety of devices, and that versatility is something that should not be dismissed quickly, particularly when you consider that this tool is free to anyone who wants to use.

Check out the video below for an overview of how InfuseLearning works in practice, and leave a comment below if you have successfully used InfuseLearning in your classroom.

$1 Wednesday iPad Apps

Mac readers may be familiar with the website twodollartues.com, a site that lets you sign up for notifications about apps from the Mac App Store that go on sale for just $2 every Tuesday. There are some good deals to be had, and savings of 50-90% are not uncommon on a wide range of apps.

Well, recently I got word that the same site is branching out to iPad apps. Starting November 7, the site will be offering a selection of iPad apps for just $1 every Wednesday. There is no word yet on the type of apps this will include, but if they include the same type of variety that I have seen for the Mac apps, there could well be some useful educational offerings in here for teachers and students. You can expect similar discounts of 50-90% off the normal price, and you can sign up for email notifications so that you know when they are available at the discounted rate.

While $1 is cheap and will likely yield a lot of great results, you still can’t beat free! So, remember that Apple has a free app of the week, with a new app announced every Thursday. Most of them have been games so far, but there have been a few useful photo apps too. Look for the App of the Week banner on the Featured section of your iOS App Store.

Digital Storytelling Apps for the iPad

The second of my two presentations at ITEC 2012 this year was Digital Storytelling Apps for the iPad. I love the potential that the iPad has as a multimedia device for creating and sharing digital stories, so I wanted to try and encapsulate some of the best ways to do that in this presentation.

The apps I chose will not necessarily be new to everyone, but I chose these apps because each is just that little bit different in their own way. Each one either pertains to a different strand of digital storytelling, or was built for a specific age level to help make digital storytelling relevant and meaningful to all ages of students.

So, if you are looking for a collection of digital storytelling apps to use in your classroom, take a look at the slides below. There are many more I would have added if I were not restricted to a 50-minute session, but these apps are a great start for K-12 educators who are looking to explore digital literacy with the iPad.

Are your favorites included in this slideshow? If not, leave a comment below with a list of your own favorite storytelling apps for the iPad.

iPad Workflow Solutions for Educators

Recently, I attended ITEC 2012 -Iowa’s premier technology conference for educators. David Pogue and Marco Torres were the keynote speakers, but there were dozens of other excellent breakout sessions over the course of this three-day event.

I myself had the opportunity to present twice, so I opted for a couple of iPad sessions that I had been wanting to talk about for some time now, and I have included the slides to the first of these two sessions below – iPad Workflow Solutions for Educators.

A digital workflow for the iPad, or the process of getting student work to and from the device, has long been a subject of some consternation among those who use iPads in the classroom. Why? The reason is simple. Apple did not build the iPad for a school environment. It was designed for an individual. As such, it was designed to be managed by an individual, with little real thought about how that individual could interact with other users.

Thankfully, this is beginning to change. Apple is less restrictive that it once was. It has loosened the reins a little with iOS and it is now actively working to help develop mobile device management software like Apple Configurator. My presentation at ITEC was designed to reflect that, and it includes some of the latest changes and developments that have been made to the iOS ecosystem.

So, feel free to take a look at some of the options that are available to you if you use iPads in the classroom. A fully digital workflow is possible on the iPad, but it is not always as intuitive as it might be. The slides here do not always tell the whole story, because of the nature of a slideshow presentation, so if you want or need any further information on any of these methods, please do not hesitate to leave a comment below.