As the iPad roll-out approaches, Sandy, Pam and I will primarily focus on writing strategies and apps that support you and your students efforts to improve writing. Writing is our forte! If you have specific iPad issues, be sure to consult members of your building technology committee or send a ticket to HelpDesk. Having said that, our success on the writing side does rely on iPad success! Some of you know iPad implementation is one of my specialties and I have supported many schools in their roll-out and implementation efforts. Below, I am sharing the top tips and tricks that I have practiced for making iPads work in the classroom, from Day 1. These can make writing, problem-solving and overall implementation a little easier for you. These are not big, broad ideas, but the nitty gritty “stuff” that is our classroom reality!
iPad Day 1 (or 2, or 3): Open Inspiration and let your kids get their thoughts out! Individually, they can do About Me work, where they brainstorm their favorite foods, sports, bands, books, games, weekend fun, summer activities. If you’ve done all the About Me work you can handle, have them pair up, read a current event article from Newsela or TweenTribune and have them use this template to begin practicing Common Core vocabulary such as “claim", “evidence for" and “evidence against". You can then have them take it a step further and pick a side, order their ideas and plan how they might write an essay to convince a family member or friend on the issue. Without them even knowing it, you have just walked them through the STOP strategy for organization in the writing process! Here is a video where I demonstrate these steps using Inspiration and STOP, explicitly.
TIP - Student Experts: Remember to empower your kids as your tech support army. There are millions of apps. You can never know the ins and outs of all of them. We sure don’t! But, you have a school full of eager students who likely know the answer, or who if given a couple minutes of pushing buttons, can figure it out! Let them. Set this up as your “norm” from the get-go! They feel empowered when you celebrate their resourcefulness and you just saved yourself some troubleshooting time. In my class, we were all in the boat together and my kids loved it when they knew something I didn’t, and so did it I. We celebrated those moments! You’ll have a lot of them in the next couple weeks!!
Did You Know that the iPad has a built-in “undo” feature? If you are typing in any app and want to undo it, shake the iPad like an etch-a-sketch and it will ask you if you want to undo. Try it! The app we will use for writing this year has no “undo” key, but the shake tip works!
Tech Support 101: Some of the most frustrating moments I have experienced with my iPad have to do with the little tray that slides out from the bottom of the iPad screen (see image below). This is the digital slide that rolls out when you swipe your finger from the bottom of the screen up. It has volume control, AirDrop, AirPlay and brightness options. It also has a whole bunch of little circle buttons, which tend to accidentally get swiped by me or my students. Get familiar with these buttons! If a student cannot get their Internet to work, check and make sure they have not accidentally turned off the wi-fi button or accidentally turned on the airplane mode. Airplane mode disables wi-fi. There is also a little moon button, which causes me anxiety when I see it, because if accidentally pressed (which happens a lot for me) then your sound will not work on calls, messages or alerts. On my iPhone, I have had numerous times when the sound won’t work but all the audio is on and turned up, and then I remember to check that button and sure enough, the phone ringing and messaging sounds work again. (Just writing those sentences made my blood pressure rise, ha!) There is also a bell with a line through it, which is a mute button that can sometimes throw a student off because their audio on videos or games won’t play, despite having the volume up. Lastly, the lock icon with the arrow is the button that will lock your Orientation. This is a helpful button if you are working with a student who struggles to maintain physical control and needs the iPad to hold orientation no matter how much they move, but if a student accidentally hits the orientation lock button and wants to rotate their iPad to vertical instead of horizontal, that button can wreak havoc!
Want More iPad Specific Help? Do you still need more iPad nitty gritty? Check out this teacher, Richard Byrne from Maine. He has practical, classroom-based tips and tricks for iPad implementation that I have followed for years. I signed up for his email feed, so every day, I learn a little something from him. This is the good stuff!
iPad Day 1 (or 2, or 3): Open Inspiration and let your kids get their thoughts out! Individually, they can do About Me work, where they brainstorm their favorite foods, sports, bands, books, games, weekend fun, summer activities. If you’ve done all the About Me work you can handle, have them pair up, read a current event article from Newsela or TweenTribune and have them use this template to begin practicing Common Core vocabulary such as “claim", “evidence for" and “evidence against". You can then have them take it a step further and pick a side, order their ideas and plan how they might write an essay to convince a family member or friend on the issue. Without them even knowing it, you have just walked them through the STOP strategy for organization in the writing process! Here is a video where I demonstrate these steps using Inspiration and STOP, explicitly.
TIP - Student Experts: Remember to empower your kids as your tech support army. There are millions of apps. You can never know the ins and outs of all of them. We sure don’t! But, you have a school full of eager students who likely know the answer, or who if given a couple minutes of pushing buttons, can figure it out! Let them. Set this up as your “norm” from the get-go! They feel empowered when you celebrate their resourcefulness and you just saved yourself some troubleshooting time. In my class, we were all in the boat together and my kids loved it when they knew something I didn’t, and so did it I. We celebrated those moments! You’ll have a lot of them in the next couple weeks!!
Did You Know that the iPad has a built-in “undo” feature? If you are typing in any app and want to undo it, shake the iPad like an etch-a-sketch and it will ask you if you want to undo. Try it! The app we will use for writing this year has no “undo” key, but the shake tip works!
Tech Support 101: Some of the most frustrating moments I have experienced with my iPad have to do with the little tray that slides out from the bottom of the iPad screen (see image below). This is the digital slide that rolls out when you swipe your finger from the bottom of the screen up. It has volume control, AirDrop, AirPlay and brightness options. It also has a whole bunch of little circle buttons, which tend to accidentally get swiped by me or my students. Get familiar with these buttons! If a student cannot get their Internet to work, check and make sure they have not accidentally turned off the wi-fi button or accidentally turned on the airplane mode. Airplane mode disables wi-fi. There is also a little moon button, which causes me anxiety when I see it, because if accidentally pressed (which happens a lot for me) then your sound will not work on calls, messages or alerts. On my iPhone, I have had numerous times when the sound won’t work but all the audio is on and turned up, and then I remember to check that button and sure enough, the phone ringing and messaging sounds work again. (Just writing those sentences made my blood pressure rise, ha!) There is also a bell with a line through it, which is a mute button that can sometimes throw a student off because their audio on videos or games won’t play, despite having the volume up. Lastly, the lock icon with the arrow is the button that will lock your Orientation. This is a helpful button if you are working with a student who struggles to maintain physical control and needs the iPad to hold orientation no matter how much they move, but if a student accidentally hits the orientation lock button and wants to rotate their iPad to vertical instead of horizontal, that button can wreak havoc!
Want More iPad Specific Help? Do you still need more iPad nitty gritty? Check out this teacher, Richard Byrne from Maine. He has practical, classroom-based tips and tricks for iPad implementation that I have followed for years. I signed up for his email feed, so every day, I learn a little something from him. This is the good stuff!