It’s now two months since a group of 27 teachers met in Sydney as part of the iTunes U Course Project and as of yesterday I have two courses published in the iTunes store. Algebra and Data, both for Year 7. Several of the others have also published courses and many more will be doing so in the next couple of weeks. By mid-September there will be approximately 30 new courses, linked to the Australian Curriculum areas of Maths, Science, History and English. It was a massive but also addictive creation process and I sincerely hope that what I have produced is of benefit to many others. I have learnt heaps about using Course Manager to create and edit courses and about iBooks Author which I used to create the multi-touch books that accompany them.

The SAMR model was a focus of course designs and having had a sneak preview of some of the other courses, I can confidently say that if you are looking to use iPads in your class in an engaging and effective way, you won’t be disappointed.  A few to look out for are ‘Year 10 –Hunger Games’ incorporating both English and History outcomes; ‘Yr 8 Energy’, a Science unit; “Between the Wars’, a Yr 10 History course; ‘The Ways Of the Force” a Yr 7 Science unit; “English Language’ for Yr 10 English and “Thematic Study: Identity and Belonging”, a Yr 7 English Unit.  Links are not yet available for all these courses, but the plan is to put the full contingent of 30 courses together in a feature ‘banner’ in the iTunes U store sometime in the second half of September.

I first trialed the use of iTunes U with my Yr 7 class in June/July with my draft Data course. The kids really took to it, loving the chance to work at their own pace and to be able to review videos and other content if and when they needed to.  The next topic was fractions and decimals and the iTunes U median made it easy to incorporate differentiation. All choices were available to all students so that they could choose, with teacher guidance, which tasks were most suitable for them at a particular stage of their learning and understanding. There were still plenty of opportunities for class discussions and group activities and many of these are built into the course. It was very timely that I was participating in Jo Boaler’s ‘How to Learn Maths’  at the same time as I was writing the fractions and decimals course as I was able to incorporate a couple of excellent ideas. The Fractions course was a private course so I was able to use content that our school has a license for, as well as my own work and materials available freely in the iTunes U materials catalogue. Over the next few months I hope to replace the licensed materials either by producing original content or by sourcing other creative commons licensed material so that I can publish it. Stay tuned.

If you don’t know much about iTunes U then I recommend you read Why (And How) Teachers Should Start Using iTunes U By Fred Sitkins