Trello for Group Planning and Projects

Sometimes, gathering a group of people together for a project and coordinating everything that has to happen can be unpredictable and confusing. Questions of who was supposed to do what and when can get tricky to coordinate. Trello is a pretty slick app and web based utility which can help. From a certain point of view, it is just a bulletin board on steroids, but its simplicity and flexibility give it power.

I'm really just a beginner on this app, having learned about it during Punahou's iPad Lab School workshops this summer (http://labschool.punahou.edu). For my Economics of Personal Finance course, the class is creating an iBook together that will cover their independent research on what graduating high school students need to know about financial planning. We will be publishing the book to the senior class at the end of the semester. We're using a combination of EasyBib on the web and Trello, both as app and web utility, to keep organized and allow students to communicate with each other and critique each other's work.

Basically, one makes an organization, has the students join it, and starts adding cards to various lists. Some setup has to happen on their website (https://trello.com/) where signing in with your 'Iolani Google account is one option. Then, you create a new organization and add boards to it.

Each board is a work space for creating cards, assigning cards to members, and commenting on those cards.

Once you have your boards added and members added to your community, the actual iPad app becomes useful. Here's my EPF 'Iolani organization in the app. I have it set up so each class section has its own board, though all members can see each board.

Once you're set up, you can add cards to To Do lists, comment on cards, attach files to cards, assign cards to members, and other features I haven't really played with yet. Here's a peek at one of our lists of student topics for the book.

Then, inside each card, you can add comments, attach files, add web links, make lists, assign cards to members, change colors, and add due dates. Below, we've used it to log the interview comments as I briefly chatted with each student on the status of their research. I'm still working out what should go in Trello and what should stay in EasyBib with their actual research. (Full EasyBib functions appear to be only web based rather than in their app.) Our processes are evolving. 

Note: We've also found some limitations because of iOS. For instance, at this point, it looks like only photos can be uploaded to a card directly from the iPad, just like in Safari. There are also a few card features that aren't yet on the iPad app but are accessible from the iPad via Safari.

This is clearly an enterprise level solution with applications inside the classroom. I wish I'd had it in the years when I was hosting the VEX robotics competitions. For any project needing organization, transparency, and a clear responsibility trail, I really like this app/web combination. It is definitely a web solution with a solid and evolving free iPad app. (The web service is also free with optional upgrade accounts, though I haven't found the free account limiting yet.)

I've only just begun to work with the app. I'd love to hear about how others are flexing the muscles of this productivity app in their classrooms or with other school projects.

Chordion: For the musician in everyone!

I found this app way back in December of last year when we first got our iPads, but I hadn't actually used it in class until last week - more on that later. Just so you know, I love music, but there is a reason I was a band geek in high school rather than in chorus. Ask my biology students. They now know why, too. :)

Anyway, this is a wonderful app that has continued to improve in the 10 months I've had it. It basically consists of a chord pad on the left side and a single note keyboard on the right. 

If you hold the iPad in landscape mode, your right thumb picks out single note melody lines while your left thumb chooses chords. You can modify the sounds of both chords and melody (in ways that I, as a non-professional, don't really understand), add in drums, arpeggios, and other background effects. You can also record your creations, reconfigure the chord pad in lots of ways, and change the scale on the keyboard. Finally, you can output to any instrument that accepts virtual MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), so I've used this to control instruments in Garage Band, an imported European organ, and several other synthesizers to get all kinds of fun instrumental sounds.

Last week in Biology, I used Chordion outputting to a grand piano in Garage Band to perform a song about cellular respiration and the production of energy to the tune of the Beatles song Obla Di Obla Da. (No, I didn't write the lyrics, but I wish I had.) In previous years, I've brought in a full size keyboard to do this performance because I'm a lousy singer. Being able to do it on the iPad was wonderful. I even had one student begin to spontaneously sing along with me. (He got some spontaneous bonus points.)

As a musician, I'm squarely in the amateur category with no real talent, but I've really enjoyed using this app kind of like an autoharp (but with a much wider range of possible sounds) to perform, pick tunes, entertain my daughter, and just jam -- and it is so portable.

Yes, it is a paid app ($3.99), and you would need to go through normal app requisition processes to get it for your classes, but for music composition and performance, it seems to have a lot of potential. I would love to hear about it being used in other classrooms.

iStudious Flashcards

Some of us got a taste for the Flashcard app through Josh Reppun's Faculty and Staff quiz stack. Over the last couple of weeks, I have found it to be a rich, entertaining way students of all ages can learn. The app is fundamentally a series of index card 'stacks' that a user can create with front and back sides containing words, pictures, and audio. The strengths of this app over the competing free apps are the many different ways that you can create, customize, and use cards.

Here's the personal story. Boni Gravelle (K-Mauka) emailed me a Keynote presentation to help my daughter Arwen learn new words containing 'a' for a reading game called Apple-O (like bingo but with their specific reading words). We started using the presentation every day, but my husband was concerned that Arwen might just be memorizing the order of the words rather than really reading. So, I transferred all the words to the Flashcards app and thought 'how simple' as the app automatically randomized the cards. That was just the beginning.

I then noticed that one could put pictures on the back of the cards so I found some pictures, added them in, and surprised Arwen by showing her there was a 'reward' picture if she read it right. The app automatically keeps track of the cards you missed and will allow you to 'retest' on the ones you tagged as having gotten wrong. I've been adding new words and changing out the pictures to keep her interest up, and she's making good progress on her 'a' words.

When I took the stack to K-Mauka to show Boni, we learned even more about the features of the app. If Siri is on, a student can read the word, speak their own sentence containing the word and see the words automatically added to their flash card. One can also annotate/draw on the cards as well as add audio. If you enable the accessibility options in iPad settings, the iPad can also read selected text to the user. 

Boni is thinking of having the students find/draw their own pictures to go with the reading words and build a class stack for all the students in the reading group to use.  For older students, the ability to add photos, drawings, and annotations is hugely flexible. The app even allows one to put hints on the card, and there are study and quiz modes to aid learning. A student can also ask for quizzes of specified length made from multiple stacks. The possibilities for enhancing their reading and writing kept popping out the more we played and discussed! 

This is what the app looks like in the App Store. The normal app request process should be followed to include this app in your teaching. In a volume purchase, the app would cost ~ $2 per user.