Learning in the Lou

 Prompt #1 Result #1 As a teacher, it's important to find ways to engage and inspire your students in the classroom. One way to do this is by using technology to enhance your lessons and activities. One tool that can be particularly useful in this regard is the iPad. One way to use the iPad in the classroom is to take pictures. This can be a fun and engaging way for students to learn about composition, lighting, and framing. It can also be a great way to document student work and projects. To take pictures with the iPad, simply open the camera app and point the camera at your subject. You can switch between the front and back camera by tapping the button in the top right corner. You can also adjust the focus and exposure by tapping and holding on the screen. Once you've taken a picture, you can view it in the Photos app. Here, you can edit the picture by cropping, adjusting the color, and adding filters. You can also share the picture with your students or save it to the cloud....

 I think there are a billion things the iPad can do, here are three big ideas to jump start everything. Safari Reader Open a page you want to read in Safari . Notice all the stuff on the sides of the page, kinda annoying. Click the aA button in the upper left. Click Show Reader on the dropdown menu. Check out Reader! The sides of the page are super clean, all you see is the article. To turn off Reader mode, click the aA and choose Hide Reader. Reader Pro Tip Check out the colors and fonts. Split Screen One screen is OK, two is much better. 1. Tap the three dots at the top of the screen. 2. Choose Split View. You should see this alert at the top of your screen. 1. The thing I was reading. 2. A Google Doc I can take notes on. Reminders One of the best ways for kids to take charge of their time and schedule. Click to open. Click New Reminder at the bottom. Name it, then click the i icon on the far right. Choose date, time and frequency. When the reminder time/date hits, there is a pop...

For years we used the H Drive to store, and backup, all of our files. In those days we were given two gigs of storage on a school server, while two gigs does not seem like much it was a ton years ago. Just like back then, the H can only be accessed while on campus. Years ago we moved to Google Drive which offered unlimited storage accessible from anywhere. Overnight we started using Drive and slowly forgot about the H Drive.  It is now time to get rid of the H once and for all. This is a lot like moving to a new house, you don't take everything with you.  Take some time to look through your H and see what actually should be move to the Drive and what you can leave behind to be securely deleted. Note: While not everyone has an H drive, if you access a place to store files as seen in the images below then you have files that must be moved. Some of these drives could also be called V or S. Moving Files There are multiple ways to find the H. Below we show you two. 1. Click the lit...

 Sometimes you, or your students, might make a mistakee when typing. Most of the time it will underline it but sometimes it won't.  When that happens it could be a few things that are going wrong. 1. Restart the iPad. It might be a good idea to do that once a week anyway. 2. Update the Google Docs app through the manager. 3. Check to make sure you have all the right things toggled on, as seen below. Start by opening the Settings app. 1. Click General on the far left. 2. Scroll down a little and click Keyboard on the right. Scroll down a bit, make sure Check Spelling is on.

Can you boost engagement, problem solving and critical thinking in the classroom? This is a difficult topic to summarize so we found a few articles to help shape our thinking. Guiding Students to See Themselves as Changemakers We all want to make a difference but what can we do? We expect the kids to leave our care and then start making a difference in the world so how do we start changemaking now? Following the methods in this article you can start that process today in the classroom. Here are a few BIG ideas I got from reading. The UN Sustainable Development Goals . These are all wicked problems with many solutions. This article will show you how to start breaking them down into smaller parts. This is key to any problem solving or design thinking, the problem must be dissected. Writing the challenge question mad libs style is one of the best ways to rework the problem into common everyday language. If we can wrap our heads around it, there is a chance we can start investigating. Step...

Adding some game-like elements to the classroom can get a few more kids to lean into the learning. The idea is to get kids engaged and adding in some new elements can help. In this post we will introduce and describe four different ways to approach gamifying your curriculum. Gimkit This site was developed by high school kids, it is a game within a game. Like many sites, Gimkit is freemium. The basics are free, if you want more you will need to purchase a license. There are a number of reviews that say Gimkit is like a live game show. What I like is it takes the best features of Kahoot without the idea that faster is better. I am not a fan of games like that, it puts the false idea of those who answer fastest is the smartest, speed over thinking. A kit is a set of questions. You build your own kit or use one of the ones already created by someone else. Some modes, or games, are only limited to five players. For this situation you can form teams. One great feature is this is web based, n...

We have used PowerPoint, Slides and Keynote for years. Most every presentation looks the same. Many kids read the slides and the slides are just full of words. While this was OK years ago, it isn't anymore. If we look at how the world is processing information, it is hyper visual. We need kids to be creating hyper visual presentations that are informative and beautiful to look at. Take a look at the Designing with Pods article.  I see four big ideas that are chunked into easily understood ideas. The images back up the text. The article links to some pods . This is another example of how information could be presented.  These two articles are examples of how information could be presented in a new, modern and engaging way.  Canva One of the tools people are using to present information is Canva. I am sure we see Canva as a way to create posters but have you seen their presentation tool ? This page offers a number of great presentation tips, just keep reading all the way t...

I remember asking my teachers when we would use the math we were learning in our lives. The answer was usually to take next year's math or to know how much carpet to buy. Carpet to buy? I was pretty sure I would never install my own carpet and next year was so far away it might as well be a million years from now. As a student learning math was the worst, I never was given a reason why. Without a why I wasn't interested in learning it. Rothfus and Munoz on gun 2 I was 19 when I was shown how math was used in the real world. Jon Recor patiently sat with me for countless hours teaching me how to use actual math to run the mortars. It was a lot of different types of math we had to calculate quickly and with 100% accuracy. If it wasn't perfect unfortunate things happen. This was the first time in my life that I understood math to this degree, I had a why. Having a why is critical to long term learning. How can we give our kids a why for math now so they don't have to wait f...

My fear of writing publicly goes all the way back to elementary school. For whatever reason the teachers always pushed for perfect, which is impossible. Look at any magazine, book or online site. Each one has mistakes and they usually have a team of editors!  What took me years to realize is perfect is impossible and the only way to improve is to write. We started this blog in 2007 and I was super reluctant to add any content at first because I knew my writing wouldn't be perfect, that old heaviness from elementary school. What pushed me was my coworker Angie. She repeatedly told me ideas where too important to keep in our heads, we needed to get them out to share with the world. I wish someone would have given that advice to me years ago. Ideas are too good to stay in our heads, they need to be shared. I still make plenty of mistakes. I still misspell things but it does not stop me from writing and sharing. This idea of sharing ideas with the world is easy to do with the kids. Her...

  I was looking for a way to get fast formative data from kids but we were on a field trip. I know I could just ask a question and count the number of hands but I thought there could be a faster way. Plickers. Mash the word paper with clicker and you get plicker. Check out minute 3:01 of this video. As the demo shows you wave your phone over the plicker and it will automatically record what the students answered. To get started: Download Plickers on your mobile device. Create an account - https://www.plickers.com/ 1. Create New Class and name it. You could create one per subject or hour. 2. Add Students 3. I entered numbers because I teach 6 sections of PE. I could add names if needed but numbers lined up to the grade book. 4. Click Next. Click Done. On the main screen click New Set in the upper left. 1. Click Survey. There are no right/wrong answers to the question I need to ask. 2. Add the prompt. 3. Add choices. Add to Queue. Pick the class you just made. On the main scree...

I need a quick way to assess my kids, so fast that I can give the formative and act upon it within a minute, is there a way to do that? Google Forms to the rescue! A big idea is to keep the number of questions you are asking between one and three.  Creating a Google Form To start, open Google Drive. Click +New in the upper left. Click Google Forms or the little arrow for more otpions. I usually click Google Forms. If I need inspiration I choose From a template. 1. Name the Form something meaningful and by reading it will give you instant context to what it is all about. 2. I can't stress this enough, add directions! Click on Multiple choice. By clicking Multiple choice you will see all the question types you can ask. For this example we are sticking with Short answer. I can't stress this enough, add a description! 1. Click the ice cream cone, the three dots. 2. Pick description. 3. Add the directions. While a Google Form can automatically collect names, I usually recommend addi...