First Aid for Ipads
Classroom Management of the Ipads Set up your guidelines in the first lesson. They need to know the rules and making them up as you go along will waste time (bitter experience sob!): These are mine from this year: No Siri unless expressly told. No video clips unless you are told and then you may use headphones. Photos will happen. PSHE needs to get involved here but in your room you should have an early conversation about being considerate and not posting later on social media. When I need you to listen the Ipads go face down. (As you would with Pens down to get full attention) In your own words must become a key phrase. You do not need students reading from Wikipedia. Insist that they must not read from a screen to give class feedback. No Ipads under the desk they stay on top all the time. The Ipads get bashed and the students get neck pain quite aside from the fact that they could be reading Fifty Shades of Grey under the table. Ipad classrooms are noisy. Have a pre agreed signal that everyone recognizes so that you can pull people back when you need to. You cannot keep raising your voice! You will find that students may want to go outside the room or manoeuvre around the space. They will not always be static at the desk. Some Basic Tips for using the Ipads Double click the home button (the round one at the bottom of the screen) to find out what apps are left on and swipe up to close apps. This saves the battery. Scrunch with five fingers to close any screen Pull down with two fingers from the very top and you will get the calendar Pull down with two fingers from the middle and you will see search apps Lock screen as horizontal, if you wish, by manually pushing the button on the side of the Ipad. If you want to move the apps around on the screen, press and hold one app. They will all start to wiggle and you can drag them around to where you want them. The bar at the bottom of the screen will hold 6 apps so make these your most useful ones. If you drag one app on top of another this creates a folder that you can name. So, you could have all the music apps together, for example. To get rid of a folder just drag all the apps out of it and it will automatically disappear. To take a photo of the screen: press the off button and the home button at the same time. SAVING PHOTOS: To save a photo on the web to your camera roll, hold your finger on the image and it will say Open - press this. Then hold your finger down again on the opened image and it will give you a menu of options
you then press Save image. This will go automatically to your camera roll and from there it is easy to transfer to other apps. How to do updates: For app updates go to app store and press updates then enter the apple password. Or go to settings and find ITunes & app store button, then slide across button for automatic app updates. Software updates: go to settings and click on general then software update. It will tell you if there is an update. If you need to free up storage see Martin. Or you could plug the charging wire into your computer and log on to ITunes and it will ask u if you want to update to IOS7. How to Switch Airplay on: Airplay Swipe up from the bottom to get the Airplay panel. Clock is on the same section to the right- timer is very useful. You can display on the board. You need to log on to the computer for this to work Turn it on by pulling up the bottom panel and sliding the Airplay/mirroring button across. This stays on if you walk out of the room with the Ipad. Beware. Remember to turn it off. Use Ipad horizontally or will not fill the board. There is a picture of a half moon turn this on and you will not get interrupted when the Ipad is in Airplay mode. First Steps Start by replacing something you normally do with an app. This seems spurious but it gets everyone using the Ipads and your confidence up. Video as a starter and plenary Pros: Good for Year 7-9, fun, effective and engaging Cons: noisy, can t use too often as it will get dull. Turn on camera and on the right are three words: video, photo, square. One of the words is yellow. Put your finger on it and slide to video. Ask the girls to video each other with what they know at the start of the lesson about Stalin/Matisse/Light particles. Give them 5 minutes. This highlights how little they know. In pairs they could come up with three things they need/want to find out next. Then teach your lesson. Leave 10 minutes at the end so that they can video each other answering the same question and perhaps revisit the list of questions they made at the start. Hey presto they ve made progress and they can see it on the video. This is simple but so much more actively engaging for them than turn to the person sitting next to you...
Socrative This is a questioning device. You create a quiz and they can sit this at their own pace or you can put a timer on it so that it ends at a certain point. You do not need to be on Airplay or logged on for this one. Ipad is as good as your teaching. Pros: Will work across all year groups because you add the questions. It emails you the answers for the whole class so you can check learning. Quick to set up. The easiest app. You can save data oh the joy! It could be a fun or serious end to a unit. It can be used collaboratively or individually. Cons: Don t make the questions too easy or it will become a gimmick. The How to use: Open the app and register as a teacher You will be allocated a room number. This is your number forever. Write it down or take a screen shot if you want to remember it but it will be on the app each time you open it. To write a quiz Choose Create a quiz Choose what type of question to add multiple choice or short answer. You can add images. Just save them to the camera roll and upload from Choose existing photo. If you want a real photo you could choose Take new If you want to include the answers write them in the box provided and the students get a test score. It will mark this for you!!! SAVE. SAVE. SAVE. Using the bottom button labelled save. Sounds obvious but I have lost a few of these. You can edit any of the questions by clicking Edit quiz To run a quiz Open Socrative Teacher. Select Start Quiz Select Saved Quiz and find the one you want Give the students the room number and tell them to log on. Select Student paced and the students can work at their own pace the
questions will appear one after another and it will only end when you click End Quiz on your Ipad. For those who finish read a book, consider the benefits of Neuroscience, do 10 press ups Select Teacher paced and you release the question one at a time. As they work, you will see Live results on the Ipad, so you can see what number question they are on and who is struggling/thinking. At the end if will ask you if you want an email of the answers and results. It will MARK these for you if you put the answers in beforehand. Explain Everything This is the one you will use the most. It will repay your time! IT WILL BE MOST USEFUL WHEN YOU HAVE A DROPBOX OR GOOGLE DRIVE ACCOUNT. IT IS A REALLY FAB FEEDBACK TOOL. Explain Everything is an application (app) that allows you, or more usefully, the girls, to annotate over any document, photo, and video... (Essentially any type of file) and then save, share, or export that file. You (or the girls) could also do voiceovers to explain what they are annotating. You can annotate free hand, or in text, as well as resize and move everything around on the slide. It is worth pointing out that there are lots of different apps that do similar things to this, but Explain Everything (although it does look a bit complicated at first) is probably the most versatile.
Things that you could do with this: 1. Take a photo of something and then explain it either with annotations, a voice over, or both. 2. Step by step guides with voiceovers, so we could actually know what they were thinking when they made that silly mistake... 3. You can import your flip charts or Power Points so that each new slide appears as a new slide on Explain Everything, and the girls could annotate those. 4. You could make your own videos with explanations or worked examples that the girls could download - more of a flipped learning kind of thing. They could watch these before they get to your lesson and arrive with the key terms you need them to have. So, practical stuff coming up! Follow these steps to create an Explain Everything file that you could use as flipped learning or marking feedback: NB: THE ICON THAT HAS AN ARROW GOING UP/DOWN (THIRD ALONG FROM MICROPHONE) IN THE BOTTOM FAR RIGHT CORNER IS THERE FOR YOU TO SAVE THE PROJECT. THIS IS VITAL. DO NOT FORGET TO SAVE! Take a photograph of some work on your camera Open Explain Everything Press + to select the colour template How to add a photo Click + on the side bar to add the photo This goes to a screen where you can edit your photo. The icon that is a circle with dotted lines allows you to draw a wavy line around the image to crop it. The square icon allows you to crop the photo with square lines. When you are happy press Done and the image will appear on the Explain Everything screen. (If you want to delete the image and start again, press the red cross on the side bar)
Add some audio At the bottom of the screen is a red dot. Press this and you can record your voice over the slide. It lights up when it is recording and you stop it by pressing pause. Listen back by pressing the green play arrow. To start again and record a different audio, just press the red arrow to the right of the timer. It will ask you if you want to replace existing. If you press and hold the green arrow it turns golden (wow!) and lets you listen to all the audio slides together) To insert text You can write with the pen but my writing is messy and I prefer to type. To do this: press the capital A on the side bar. A box will appear that you can type in. Hold down the A to change the size and font. Above the box are three pictures of newspapers! This is the usual position left/centre/right. Press this before you begin to write. When you finish typing, press the green tick at the top of the box. If you know you want to type up a reasonable amount, then stretch the box before you start to write using the blue arrows at the bottom of the text box. Otherwise, half of the text may disappear. To add music Add your ipod selection to ITunes and you could embed sound. This would be great if you wanted to keep all your info for one lesson in one place: you could have one of Obama s speeches and one song and key words for the lesson all on one slide. To add a You Tube clip or other web page Find the web page/clip on Safari and copy the link (hold your finger on it until it says select then press copy and leave the page to open explain Everything) then select New Browser and hold your finger down on the top bar and press paste. The video will now open on that page. NB: when you save the page you will save a static image so when you want to use it in class double tap on the address and it will scroll up and down/play for you. If you want to annotate on the web page press the pen
and draw but then press the hand and double click to be able to scroll up and down again. To add another slide Press + next to where it says slide 1 of 1 to create the next slide number 2 will appear. If you want to see all the slides at once (or to delete slides quickly) press and hold the text that says slide 1 of 4/5/6/12 and all the slides will appear in miniature for you to look at Press the slide you want to get to and it will just open on that slide. To delete a slide: simply press and hold and a red x will appear for you to press.) IMPORTING YOUR EXISTING POWERPOINTS/FLIPCHARTS IS POSSIBLE. Find the PowerPoint. Email it to yourself. Click on the email attachment to download it. When it has downloaded, click on it again and choose Open in Explain Everything. It will go straight there and then you just press save. Experiment with saving it as a PDF as sometimes things do not translate very well. Saving as a PDF can help with this. I save mine as PDF. YOU MUST SAVE THE FILE BY PRESSING THE PICTURE OF ARROWS GOING UP AND DOWN IN THE FAR RIGHT CORNER. THIS WILL PROMPT YOU TO NAME THE FILE. YOU CANNOT HOPE TO KEEP THE FILE IF YOU JUST SHUT THE IPAD. Exporting your audio file to Drop box This will allow you to email information to girls or to upload it onto a blog. The girls say this is very useful and feedback has been positive.
Save the project to your own Ipad by pressing the house icon in the far right. On the main screen press the Export movie button (in blue below). Then press the drop box icon above it. This will take you to a screen that says, Export your project. Along the bottom is a bar that says Drop box. Select Drop box by pressing on it. Once you have Drop box, all your files will appear and you can save the project in the right place for you. Select where you want it to go. Then, in the top right is a big green button that says, Export. Press this. The Ipad has to stay open on the Explain Everything app for the whole time that you are downloading the file. You cannot go off the page and read the news or browse Mulberry bags. Sad but true. It compresses the file to export and then has to download to Drop box. It takes a while tidy the kitchen, write a novel or have a bath just leave the Ipad open on the right page! Once, this is done you can go to Drop box, click share and it will generate a link that you can email to students or paste onto a blog. When you start it will all take ages so use this for things that you can repeat and build up your resources.
Closing Advice You are the most important teaching resource in the room. The Ipad is there to enhance your teaching. Interacting with an Ipad is not the outcome you want from your lesson nothing essential has changed. Using the Ipads collaboratively in lessons is less scary that way you are managing pupil talk and interaction (and you all do that standing on your heads.) When you start next year, trial any initiatives with Year 8 and 9. These year groups have had a year of working with the Ipads and they are digital natives. Do not expect year 7 to do it instantly. They will need instructions for at least 5 minutes but then they will do it faster than you. At first, find two or three apps and ignore the rest. Get competent and clever with a small range and then branch out. I like Socrative, Explain Everything, Book Creator and Evernote. Ask for help. There is no shame in feeling hysterical.
Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway