Differentiated Supervision

Cooperative Staff Development:Suzi Bender

Candi GillilandJeff Vogus

Objectives:

• To establish a procedure for using iPads and iPods in the classroom

• To aid each other in setting up the carts, purchasing apps, and syncing the carts with our iTunes accounts

• To integrate the use of iPads and iPods into our classrooms

Achievements:

• We have drafted a proposed policy regarding student responsibility when issued an iPod

• We have established a routine for the process of purchasing and syncing apps.

• We have identified a number of apps that enhance and reinforce our instruction.

• We have trialed apps with our students to determine their ease of use.

iPods - Apps and Uses:

• Spelling Test app: Lists can be loaded onto this app. Students then take their spelling test on the iPod rather than a traditional paper/pencil test. This enables students who are absent to take the test without having to have the teacher drop everything to pronounce the words. Also, students can have the word repeated as often as they like. Students can also work at their own pace.

Apps and Uses:

• Reading Trainer: This app is intended to increase reading and comprehension rates in students. The PSSA Reading class is using this app on an almost daily basis. I’m not sure if it is effective in its goals, but the students are reading while they’re using it AND they enjoy it.

Apps and Uses:

• Dictionary.com: This app enables students to quickly and easily look up the definition, pronunciation, and origin of any unfamiliar term. Students use this while reading independently. They also use it for our word root, prefix, and suffix units in vocabulary.

Apps and Uses:

• Lit Analysis: This app provides a wheel labeled with the components of poetry and one for prose. Each component is interactive and provides definitions and examples to reinforce the concept. AP English students use this app during essay writing to enhance the scope of their essay and to clarify any confusion regarding what a prompt may be asking.

Apps and Uses:

• Rhyme Free: This app is basically a rhyming dictionary. This is helpful when students are given poetry assignments and need to follow a specific rhyme scheme. Students use this in PSSA Reading and in 12th grade English when we cover the sonnets.

Apps and Uses:

• SAT Vocab: Students use this app voluntarily when they have extra time to practice the vocabulary for the SAT’s.

Apps and Uses• Voice Memos: This is one of the tools available in the Utilities on the

iPods. Students who are unable to write due to injuries to their writing hands/fingers can use this to make an audio recording of their answers in lieu of writing. Students in Algebra I class have also used this app to record conversations among members of a small group when performing an open-ended, higher-level thinking task. Teachers can then listen to the recordings and analyze student thinking and assess level of understanding. Using this app to record the conversations has been very beneficial because it allows teachers to know what thinking took place in each group and from each student without having to be at every group at every moment. Recording the conversations also seemed to keep all students more on the task presented to them.

Apps and Uses:• Calculus AB Review: This app is a great study aid for students planning on taking

the AP Calc AB exam. Each student has his own ipod to use during class, so individual progress is monitored. The app contains 500 multiple choice questions similar to those on the AP exam. Hints and detailed explanations are provided, and if a student chooses an incorrect answer, the app suggests the mistake that was most likely made via the “Why is this wrong?” button. Calculus AB Review also includes 10 audio lectures complete with notes, graphs, and diagrams. Students have begun to explore this app during spare moments after regular classwork is done in order to learn to get around within the app. Once the AP Calc students enter the “practice for the exam phase” of the course, students will be required to report and analyze their exam statistics regularly in an attempt to increase the speed in which they complete questions successfully. In the past, many students who have not scored the highest on the exam have simply not completed enough of the test in the allotted time. Hopefully this app will help remedy that problem.

Apps and Uses:• Algebra Touch – This app provides non-academic students the opportunity

to learn algebraic techniques, skills, and procedures through manipulation of variables and terms on the touch-screen. This approach not only appeals to students’ kinesthetic learning styles, but it reinforces the procedures that often go unnoticed when students get bogged down by the tedium of traditional methods. For example, students “drag” to rearrange terms in order to collect like terms to add or subtract. Distribution of a monomial through a polynomial is accomplished by “sliding” terms across the sum. This app has many practice problems built into it, but the versatility of creating your own problems or editing the existing ones is extremely valuable in differentiating instruction and practice.

Apps and Uses

• Vernier Video Physics: This allows a student to record a video of some type of motion, plot the position as a function of time, and graph the position and velocity in the x- and y- directions.

• iMolecule Builder: Students can build molecules virtually, and observe the shapes and structures. This is a nice app as the student must know some bonding concepts without having to be experts.

Apps and Uses:

• Coaster Physics: You can design your own roller coaster and observe the potential energy, velocity, acceleration and forces as the ride proceeds.

• Intellective Physics: This app includes lessons and quizzes that can assist students in understanding basic concepts.

iPads – Apps and Uses:

• The iPad cart is not “officially” ready to go yet. Johnny and Lenny need to configure the cart.

• The iPads have been used, however, on a smaller scale.

• PSSA Reading classes have used the iPads for Study Island. They are much more user-friendly than the small laptops they had to use previously.

• PSSA Math classes have also used the iPads for Study Island.

iPads – Apps and Uses:• ShowMe Interactive Whiteboard – This app allows students (and teacher)

to record voice and writing. Math students have used ShowMe to explain solutions to problems while recording their written work as well. The app allows for import of pictures which allows students access to more visual approaches to problem solving. However, until just this week students were not able to save or share their creations due to a technical difficulty with access to the main Showme storage area cloud. Lenny has fixed that problem, so from here until the end of the year students will create ShowMe presentations for various problems. These ShowMe projects will be saved and links to them will be available via www.bendermath.wikispaces.com.

iPads – Apps and Uses:

• Camera -- The camera feature of the iPad2 is useful because it allows the teacher to take pictures of student work and display it immediately on the projector for analysis and discussion.

PETE & C

• I left PETE & C with LOTS of ideas for how to use iPods and iPads in my class. Here are a few:

• eClicker – allows iPods to work as remotes so that students can respond to a multiple choice question. With this, I know that everyone is participating and who is missing the mark.• Markers – converts websites into “article” format.

Students can highlight in different colors. The app then separates what was highlighted into groups by color.

PETE & C• Jumbline Lite – students see how many words they can create

from a set of letters – a fun game that allows them to better understand how words are constructed

• In a World Drama – students can create movie trailers for literature that we read in class

• QR Scanner/Qrafter – I can set up questions, links to websites, etc. Students access them quickly and easily with the QR symbol.

• AudioBoo – makes it easy to create podcasts for students• Class dojo – convenient way to track class participation• Teacher’s pick – an app that randomly selects students and

tracks what students have been called on so that I am making all students participate

PETE & C

• PETE & C affords me two different experiences:– Sessions that encourage and inform me in the

area of integrating technologies into my courses– Sessions that sound good on paper but are not

applicable to what I try to do here at MUAHS

This Past PETE & C

Great Ideas• Tool Factory’s Stop Motion

videos: I got a free software disc, and some terrific ideas of how to record long-term changes.

• iPad IS for Content Creation: This was about using photos, movies, text, sound to make our own presentations, documents, and even textbooks!

Not For Me• Google SketchUp 3D

Modeling: I hoped this might be a good tool for molecular modeling. It won’t work for that. Too restrictive for my application.

• iPad/iPod Integration: These often gave a narrative rather than ideas.