Chris Mooney talks about using the iPads with students

A while back, I asked Chris Mooney how she was experiencing the iPads in her English as a second language (ESL) classroom. She replied that so far, they have already been looking at YouTube videos and information texts, and it's been fun.

In future, Chris would like to find ways to:

• play interactive games on the overhead,
• get the group doing gap-fill (cloze) activities together,
• get into reading information texts as a group.

You can hear the whole one-minute conversation here: 

What about you -

• what have you done with an iPad in your classroom, and 
• what would you like to learn next? 

Let us know in the comments. 


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Photo by Per-Olof Forsberg, CC-BY (creative commons at flickr).

Q&A session at Spring St Campus - many many questions!!

So, the session we had at Spring St was more chaotic than the one we had at Reservoir Neighbourhood House. Again, we started with brainstorming questions, but this time we dived straight into responding before the full list had built up.

06 May at Spring Street

Airdrop - what is it and how does it work?

Much of this session focussed on Airdrop, as many of you wanted to experiment and get hands-on with it. We tested out sending photos and documents from one iPad to another. 

• How do we know what number is our ipad? We did work this out .. it's engraved on the back: 
• Yvonne (29) Nilanthi (30) Catherine (73) Anna (Da Young) Chris Mo (24) Anna B (75) - all working 
• Belinda (31) - her ipad is very very slow
• can we airdrop from google drive?
• answer, possibly yes, but it's a bit complex

Evaluating airdrop as a way to share documents with students in the classroom: 

• NB: airdrop is problematic:
• takes a while and not always responsive - is it because the file size is huge?
• you only get a second or two to accept - this could be trouble in a classroom!!
• you need to work out who has which iPad, and then track who managed to save the document. 
• Can we change the settings to make airdrop last longer?
• seems like NO is the answer to this.

Is there a better way of sharing documents? 

What about this:

Q&A session 3 - apps for English

A few teachers got together at Reservoir Neighbourhood House in May, to explore iPad apps for teaching and learning. This was the second session we had at the RNH.

Apps worth looking at:

• Spell better, 
• Dragon dictate, 
• Google translate - lets you add words by handwriting, 
• Park stories (Link??)

Apps we’re not so sure about:

A few apps got the vote of displeasure because of their hidden cost. There might be a free basic version, but if you want the full app, you could be looking at over $150 for a class set. 

• Sound English (.com) is $13 per app. 
• PB phonics is $7.50 for the full 1-7 activities. 
• obook Library (oxford) has only one free book (“Jack and his Jeep”?)
• speak & translate is $13 
• Farmer’s lunch - he won’t speak

Issues here: 

“You get excited because of the novelty”, but once you’ve tested them out, many apps aren’t that suitable."

Copy a presentation file from iPad to laptop

Faye, one of the amazing teachers at PRACE, got her students to make slide presentations using Keynote on the iPads.

• The students showed their presentations on the big screen with Airplay, 
• and then sent their files to Faye via Airdrop. 

Then we wondered how to get all those presentation files from Faye's iPad to her laptop.

One way to do this is to share the Keynote file with google drive.. you can then get to the files on your laptop or desktop, at drive.google.com in the web browser.

This is the first video screencast I've attempted with only visual cues, no voiceover. What do you think?

• Too fast, too slow? 
• Is it clear, or too obvious?

Many apps on the iPad allow you to share your files somehow, eg:

• via email
• via a cloud storage thing like dropbox, google drive or skydrive (microsoft)
• between different apps.

How could you extend this knowledge to different apps? 

How would you use presentations in class with your students?