It was a busy week, culminating on Friday with visitors to the Yr 7 class to see how we use iPads in our Maths class. Teachers and principals from other schools had enrolled in a one day program to visit three schools to observe and compare their use of both laptops and iPads in a variety of classrooms. At Ringwood we are using The SAMR model, moving from substitution, where technology is used as a substitute without any real change, (eg. word processing rather than writing, or reading questions from a textbook on the iPad rather than a hard copy), to Redefinition, using technology for tasks that would not have been possible without it.

So what were students doing when the visitors arrived?

One group of students was working on their skills booklet before moving onto the ‘hands on measurement’ activity later in the lesson. We pretest students before each unit and allocate one of three skills booklets for them to work on based on what they already know. (They are able to move across to another booklet if they pick up the missing skills quickly). These skills booklets are in a pdf format. Students access them from dropbox and open them in the app Noterize (PaperPort Notes), so that they are able to annotate directly to the page. They still have a traditional workbook, and pen and paper is used where the Maths task requires more than one step of ‘working out’.

A second group started the lesson working on the Hands On Task. They were working outside the classroom taking measurements of given objects (a ramp, and the entrance to the locker bay). They had a document, also in Noterize, where they recorded the measurements and showed calculations to convert the measurements into different units. They also used their iPad to take photos of what they were measuring and insert them directly into the document. These photos were then annotated with the measurements in metres and centimetres. There are several tasks in this booklet and once complete each student’s work will be uploaded into a shared folder on dropbox.

The third group of students, who had completed the Hands On task in a previous lesson, were producing instructional videos using Educreations. Their task was to  create a video to teach other students in the class how to find the perimeter and area of rectangular based composite shapes.This is the second task of this type that they have completed. While I haven’t seen the finished products yet, it was clear from watching these students work that they were able to respond to  feedback, both complimentary and constructive, on the previous task.  (All students in the class had produced a video on one of four topics from the angles unit, which were posted on Edmodo, and they each had to view and comment on the work of at least 3 others). These students were taking great care to think about how to teach the concept to others, what would make suitable examples, how quickly to increase the level of difficulty of examples etc. To produce a professional looking video, they were using other apps such as Sketchbook Express to produce their examples or ‘googling’ for suitable images. Once complete these videos will again be uploaded onto Edmodo to share with others and to provide a valuable resource for other students in the class.

The students were keen to talk to the visitors about what they were doing and to show them other examples of work they had done. One visitor asked a group of boys, ‘Out of 10, how would you rate having iPads in your classes?’. ’10/10′ replied two of them and ’9/ 10′ said the other two. Knowing how much these boys like to play games on their iPads out of class I qualified – ‘how do you rate it FOR LEARNING?’, ‘Oh’, said one of the 10/10 boys, ‘In that case, 9 1/2.’