iAnnotate for Paperless Midquarters

As we finished up turning in midquarters, I found myself reflecting on how the paperless office can actually work in ways that I hadn't expected. Usually, I'm in terror of having our wonderful proofreaders find some series of dumb grammatical or, heaven help us, spelling errors. So, I have developed over the years a sequence for trying to minimize my embarrassment. First, I type a draft of the comment into Excel (which I have set up to merge with their numerical grades into a final comment). Then, I proof in Excel and copy and paste into Senior Systems (either from the PC or from MyBackpack). Then, I print and proof and correct and reprint, cursing silently each time a comma mistake makes me reprint the entire class. Somehow, I can't catch errors as easily trying to read from the screen in Senior Systems. Paper has worked better for me, unfortunately.

For the most part, I've been avoiding printing from MyBackpack because the format of the report takes up more paper than from the PC, and I'm trying to save trees' lives.

However, this week, I happened to be away from my PC when I really wanted to work on comments. So, I was able to do the cut and paste part using Numbers  and Safari to access MyBackpack. My Excel spreadsheet opened in Numbers from its home in SkyDrive just fine. Since we can't print directly from the iPads, I logged into MyBackpack from a nearby laptop in the library and got ready to print. 

At that point, I realized that I could save the PDF forms of the report from the "Printable Version" (see below), email them to myself, "Open In" on the iPad, and do my usual 'paper' editing on iAnnotate with a stylus. I think it worked like a charm. I was able to have the feel of using paper for scribbling and checking things off while saving on the multiple reprints. My final test will be when I get them back with administrative comments, but it felt really functional.

Now, I just feel dumb because I didn't think to do this a year ago. Hope your comment writing was happy!

Remember that iAnnotate is available for Iolani users, and that your favorite PDF editor (like Notability or some promising looking free ones now available) would work just as well.

P.S. In the week since I started this post, I got my comments back from our administration, and there weren't any errors on it that had to do with this work flow system. There were a couple of other items, but that's another story. :)

The Continued Need for Face to Face

This week, I was questing around to see what new iPad or technological gizmo I was going to write about. As I started thinking, though, I was finishing up an exercise I call "Face to Face" with my Economics of Personal Finance seniors. I started doing this several years ago after reading some articles on the importance of the personal relationship in education - and having a few students say they weren't comfortable going in for extra help in all their classes. Also, my husband is fond of saying that we are often trying to change people's behavior 'at the margins.'

So, here's the deal. Each student makes an appointment to come see me one on one for about 10 minutes on a free period. During that time, I ask them about how their classes are going, if they're stressed, and to tell me about their favorite class. I make a point of asking the student what their passion is - the thing they do that makes them happiest to be themselves. That's the starting point. Over the years, I've learned about students who do off road unicycling, feel at one with God when they are surfing, and design beautiful pieces of art. The conversation then goes where it goes, and I finish up by having them ask me something. Those have been interesting questions, too. I've talked to students about premarital sex, illicit drug use, politics, religion, education, travel, and research.

I do this exercise with each new batch of students at the start of the semester, and while it isn't possible to have hard numerical data, I believe that the Face to Face has increased comfort for at least a handful of students a semester and made it more likely that they will come to me with questions, both academic and personal. While no teacher can expect to truly bond with every student, it seems to me that we should be trying to set up a community where every student can bond with someone they can go to for commiseration or celebration.

The only technology I use in this exercise is a Numbers spreadsheet to jot down a few notes while I'm chatting with them - just so I remember which student does what. Especially for these finance seniors who are in a hybrid classroom/online experience with Showbie and do a lot of their assignments digitally, the chance to talk to them one on one has been truly valuable. It takes a fair amount of time to get each student in, but it has been worth doing for me.

I figure that if out of the 16-20 students in each class, I can make a connection with at least 1-2 students, it is time well spent. I'm not asking for a lifelong bond to form - just to make them comfortable enough with me that they will come in for help when they may not have otherwise. This is truly changing behavior just at the margins, but that's what we do each and every day as teachers. We pride ourselves on having low student teacher ratios, but it is the increased potential for nurturing and mentoring because of those ratios that I think is really important. Besides, it is fun to learn what the students are up to and how they see the world.

Extensions of Google Drive

As a member of a Google school, I'm always exploring new ways to push the envelope using Google in the classroom. The reach of Google keeps expanding, and maybe one day, they'll produce the database app I've been coveting. For now, though, one interesting extension of Google is the way third party applications are integrating into Google Drive.

In this post, I'll propose one possibility of how to use a third party whiteboarding app called Conceptboard within the Google world. Conceptboard is a rich whiteboarding environment where multiple users can draw, insert pictures, and type on a common whiteboard. There are free and paid accounts which can be linked to one's Google account. Here's the basic idea. I am just a beginner, though, and there are features I haven't yet explored.

From in the desktop (as versus mobile) version of Google Drive on the iPad, one can Create documents using the button in the upper left for apps other than Google's own document types (below).

The choices you see (below) are the apps which you have given access to your google edrive. (Because are a whole host of integrated third party apps by using the 'connect more apps' link at the bottom of the 'Create' menu.

There are photo and video editors, graphing calculators, and all manner of other potentially useful apps to browse through and link to your Google account. Some are free, and some are paid. 

One example is Conceptboard. Conceptboard, like many apps, has free and paid levels with different features. The free account has a limitation on board space that I have not yet run over, though I haven't used it full scale with a class for anything but basic brainstorming. At any rate, once you have linked the app to your Google Drive, it shows up as an option when you try to create a document.  Below is the New Board I created through Drive on iOS Safari to show Josh how the app works. You can then share the document the same way you would share other Google documents.

And here is how the same board looked on Josh's Mac laptop.

Once the document is saved to your Google Drive, it shows up like any other (New Board below) and can be clicked on to launch. One caveat for iPad users... The mobile version of Google Drive doesn't seem to work quite right. You apparently need to be in desktop version which you can get to from the very bottom of the screen.

This has great potentials for real time collaboration and group work of all kinds, and the app developers keep adding neat new features. While you do have minor account set up to do in the beginning, your work is part of your Google Drive and easy to find and organize. I don't want to get into excruciating detail about Conceptboard because the real point is to show you there are other possibilities than the standard for students at a Google School.

If Conceptboard isn't what you need, there are scads of other kinds of apps to look at. Enjoy!

littleBig History: Correlations and Associations

This week, I'm building on the idea of finding associations. This is another app that seemed to be a great tool for helping students see connections and correlations in discoveries and historical events.

On one hand, it appears to be a simple timeline with people and events on it. 

When you click on one, it brings up other information including a link to the appropriate Wikipedia article. There may also be tags to click on to lead you to other related articles.

As I poked around, though, I discovered that there are all kinds of ways to focus your inquiry, from choosing the general time frame on the bottom to selecting specific topics along the top. (See above and below.)

One caveat: You are subject to the filtering of the authors concerning the content. For instance, some events I thought of as important like the Magna Carta in 1215 don't seem to show up. I'm not a true enough student of history to catch important omissions, necessarily, but for some reason, I noticed that one. Despite its limitations, I found it to be a lot of fun. I could zoom in and out of the timeline, find things quickly, and see temporal associations that I hadn't noticed before. It seems to be a solid tool for any question asking about the historical context of a person or event, giving students an easy way to look at a broad range of topics. It is clearly not a deep reference but a simple, easy to use way to get students to start asking good questions.

Normal app requisition procedures would apply, though I did get to try it for free through Apps Gone Free.