Digital Fluency Intensive Day 4 - Devices / iPads

I love iPads and I love my iPhone and anything Apple. Whilst I am not a exclusionist and dis any other makes,  I am unashamedly an Apple fan, right down to Apple TV and Netflix.

So when it comes to iPads and Explain Everything (EE) this is all new learning to me. I have tried to use a while lot of other whiteboards and apps on iPads, I have never found one that has the features of EE. It is worth every penny spent on it. With schools investing in EE we need to make sure that the use of it is maximised.

Currently I am facilitating in a New Entrant class with iPads and loving every minute of it. The challenge of working with new learners who each have an iPad is huge. The class teacher and I are both newbies to this way of working and are nutting out the intricacies as we go. Not quite building the plane as we fly, but close.

Today I learnt how to trim audio. Yay! last week in class we were trying to do this and ended up deleting both the audio and the beautiful creative picture on the screen. Ouch! the learner was not happy!

Ending the day with a Hangout with Anjila from Auckland's DFI group was a bonus today. She had just sat her Google Certified Educator Level 1 exam this morning and talked about how she found it. One of her tips was to use a laptop that is not old She struggled with an old laptop from her school which slowed her down because it was slow. Our cohort sure did enjoy connecting with the Auckland cohort and gleaning gems from them. Not only did we find out more and ease our anxiety around the exam, we also practised Hangouts and their power to connect and communicate. A great example of "connected learners share".

Digital Fluency Intensive Day 4 - Devices / Chromebooks

Devices - my kind of day. As a facilitator I work mostly with learners and Chromebooks. But this year I am working with a new entrant class and iPads. This is very exciting. Scarey - but exciting. Lots of new learning!

Whilst I am using my MacBook every waking minute of the day in my job, I very rarely touch a Chromebook keyboard. I very seldom take over any learner's keyboard. I mostly point to assist them and get them to click, drag, etc etc. So working on a Chromebook in Slides was pretty novel for me.

The first thing I noticed on the Chromebook that was how small the slides were and the text even tinier. I must pay attention to the slides I make from now on and ensure that any text is highly visible and not too small.

So today on the Chromebook I particularly liked the Digital Dig and grabbed some more shortcuts that wold be great to have in my arsenal. My aim is to use a Chromebook more often while preparing material for students and practise the shortcuts to get them embedded into my brain.

Playing with Screencastify and commenting. We noticed that there was a tick box in Screencastify that allows others to comment.

Maria and I commented on each other's Screencastify video we made today and you can see how the comments behave if you pop the video out and play it in its own window.
The comment is also viewable in Screencastify when you open the video.

So we discovered another feature of Screencastify today. It's great to have the time to play and discover like this and then to test it. Now we are asking the question - how would learners use this? My initial thoughts are to use them exactly as we would comments in Docs, Slides etc - to to connect and communicate, to give feedback and feedforward.