There's plenty going on at PRACE in the world of digital learning, digital literacies, e-learning and e-business. And often solutions are found in small groups of people, or in brief conversations. Here Michael Chalk attempts to share some of the problem-solving that goes on, as teachers and learners struggle with technologies.
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
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?
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.
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.
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?
Recently teachers at PRACE have relied more and more on the big classroom televisions to broadcast what's on their iPad or laptop screen.
Unfortunately we've had a weird situation at Spring St where the remote control for the TV doesn't work. Last week I visited Jan down at the new campus, and this was one of the issues arising.
So we called Fraser and discovered the solution.
Here's what you need to do if this happens to you:
Find the small USB dongle marked "RF" - attached to a cable - hanging off the back of the TV
Unplug it from the cable
On your remote control, find the RF button on the back (the horizontal keyboard side)
Push that RF button on the remote, and watch the red light on the remote
When the red light stops flashing, and goes constant red, plug in the USB dongle where it came from.
If it doesn't stop flashing, you may need to power off/on the remote control first.
Let us know how you go, in the comments below. Did this work for you?
BTW, Fraser is also looking into ways to make sure this doesn't happen.
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