Turn it all on!
At our fingertips we have powerful technological devices such as the mobile phone, which is more powerful than the computer I was using for my university projects!How are we harnessing this power in class? Could we be using it more?
Mobile Phones
Above George Couros talks about the power of technology and mentions the Mother Teresa High School, who are asking their pupils to turn their devices on when they arrive at school. I know that this is the opposite of what is being asked of pupils in many schools; "don't have your phone out" is a mantra that can often be herad. The reasoning is often comments such as: who knows what the pupils will be doing if they have their phones out or pupils can not focus when they have their phones out.I can understand these worries, in a class when you have total control, it is hard to have items that are beyond your control. However, if we want our students to be responsible then surely we need to treat them as responsible and trust them and their choices. Will these choices always be correct - no! but this is part of classroom management; you have clear and well defined rules of behaviour.I personally let pupils use their phones in my class to harness this powerful technology. The uses we make of them are not mind-blowing: they use the camera to take and share images or short videos, they may read or post tweets, they may use them to access blogs, they maintain their homework diaries, they record sound and even, on occasion, I have had pupils record parts of my lesson that they want to access again.
Ipads (Tablets)
The power of phones is still to be realised in many schools, but what about the power of single use devices such as the iPad. I manage the iPad cart at school and I find myself wondering "How they these being used?" Are they effective teaching tools?This interesting article talked about the move away from iPads and moved to Chrome books in some areas. There is no real conclusion as price obviously played a big role but they were conscious "We can’t keep up with the trends in personal devices" If this is the case is it worth keeping a school set of personal devices at all?I work in a BYOD environment, (though one that has specified the minimum specification of the devices that can be used - ruling out tablets devices) that can guarantee each child is equipment with a technical device in class. However these are all laptops devices - are we missing a trick by not allowing for the use of tablets?I am not sure how useful a single person device can ever be (unless everyone has one). However, I do understand that there are some things that these devices do better than laptops (at the moment, though with the development of touch screen technology I think these divides are shrinking)Here is a list of the tools that I think are useful. They are all tools that must be used on a tablet or phone. I could have added Green screen, iMovie, Blog Editor but these are tools that can be used on any device, they do not require a tablet.Explain Everything - Annotation of ideas and development of presentationsInkFlow - Visual Note takingBook Creator - Making interactive booksFlipboard - Magazines and Magazine developmentAurasma - Augmented Reality platformI Can Animate - Create stop Motion animationArt Rage - Art AppI am sure there are more and would love to compile a better list so feel free to share ideas. I am trying to develop the iPads we have into a set of useful devices that do something different to the laptops. I think they can be powerful creative devices, I am still unsure if this creativity can be harnessed with a set that is taken out for a specific lesson.