To be honest I have been quite excited about this course. Even before partaking in Justin’s BYOD seminar in OLTD 509, I was very interested in mobile devices and the use of tablets in the classroom.
I guess it has been about five years now that I have had an old Lenovo tablet as my teaching tool, and have taken every chance I could get to put it into the students’ hands. I have always loved asking students to demonstrate their work from their desk on the overhead screen. There are very few students who do not light up when they are presenting a solution or other sort of work on the big screen. It was an easy and wonderful transition to having my students this year present their iMovies or Toontastic videos through the appleTV.
Another new experience this year was an introduction to the, “Hour of Code” website. Students loved the components that allowed them to look at creating simple games and apps. I loved the self-directed part of it using videos to allow students to advance at their own pace. This is something that I am hoping to explore more of in this course.
There were several points that stuck out for me in the slideshow The Dirty Little Secret of Mobile Training from Michael Yonker. The first was the quote, “Cause change and lead”. This reminds me of our professor Avi Luxenburg. He has always been a firm believer that in order to create change you must sometimes create a crisis. I thought it very fitting that he was responsible for the Emergent Technologies course with it’s focus on disruptive technologies as I think he would be the first to say that to move forward we must often be disruptive.
It is also interesting to see email, wikis and sharepoints as things of the past. Well, not necessarily a thing of the past, but as things that may not be the most conducive to teaching our kids. I love the term ‘ghost town sharepoints and wikis’ as there is a trail of empty wikis and other resources in our district created by teachers with all good intents. I think that many of us found the Google+ communities so successful due to the fact that they were in our face. The notifications on my phone and ipad made it very easy to stay involved in the conversation versus having to log into some site when I got home.
The video entitled Why Mobile Learning? certainly provides some compelling examples for the use of these technologies with disabled learners. I myself have not worked in a special needs class or school, however, I have seen the power that these devices can bring to students with learning disabilities. During my six-week stint with our school’s ipads this year I noticed a complete surge in confidence and engagement from my students who are dyslexic, unable to read, or inflicted with attention disorders. With each of the exercises that I brought forward they were able to participate to the same degree as all of the other students. All of a sudden I had boys who could not put a word down on paper, or a word processor, creating complex stories in Toontastic or elaborate movies in imovie.
I spent over $600.00 ($9.99X60 ipads) on the Toontastic app, but through all of my research I found it the most robust story-telling tool and well worth the money. It is gems like this that I hope to learn about from Greg and my peers in this course.
I guess it has been about five years now that I have had an old Lenovo tablet as my teaching tool, and have taken every chance I could get to put it into the students’ hands. I have always loved asking students to demonstrate their work from their desk on the overhead screen. There are very few students who do not light up when they are presenting a solution or other sort of work on the big screen. It was an easy and wonderful transition to having my students this year present their iMovies or Toontastic videos through the appleTV.
Another new experience this year was an introduction to the, “Hour of Code” website. Students loved the components that allowed them to look at creating simple games and apps. I loved the self-directed part of it using videos to allow students to advance at their own pace. This is something that I am hoping to explore more of in this course.
There were several points that stuck out for me in the slideshow The Dirty Little Secret of Mobile Training from Michael Yonker. The first was the quote, “Cause change and lead”. This reminds me of our professor Avi Luxenburg. He has always been a firm believer that in order to create change you must sometimes create a crisis. I thought it very fitting that he was responsible for the Emergent Technologies course with it’s focus on disruptive technologies as I think he would be the first to say that to move forward we must often be disruptive.
It is also interesting to see email, wikis and sharepoints as things of the past. Well, not necessarily a thing of the past, but as things that may not be the most conducive to teaching our kids. I love the term ‘ghost town sharepoints and wikis’ as there is a trail of empty wikis and other resources in our district created by teachers with all good intents. I think that many of us found the Google+ communities so successful due to the fact that they were in our face. The notifications on my phone and ipad made it very easy to stay involved in the conversation versus having to log into some site when I got home.
The video entitled Why Mobile Learning? certainly provides some compelling examples for the use of these technologies with disabled learners. I myself have not worked in a special needs class or school, however, I have seen the power that these devices can bring to students with learning disabilities. During my six-week stint with our school’s ipads this year I noticed a complete surge in confidence and engagement from my students who are dyslexic, unable to read, or inflicted with attention disorders. With each of the exercises that I brought forward they were able to participate to the same degree as all of the other students. All of a sudden I had boys who could not put a word down on paper, or a word processor, creating complex stories in Toontastic or elaborate movies in imovie.
I spent over $600.00 ($9.99X60 ipads) on the Toontastic app, but through all of my research I found it the most robust story-telling tool and well worth the money. It is gems like this that I hope to learn about from Greg and my peers in this course.