iPad Use in the High School

As you know, the high school has 25 iPads in a cart that are available for checkout for learning purposes. The iPads and the variety of apps installed work wonderfully for content creation purposes. They also allow the students and teacher to be more mobile as they gather content and create. Laptops can be a bit cumbersome at times when you’re out and about collecting nuggets of learning. Through iPad apps, they can also access information and processes that aren’t always available in other platforms. Here are some examples of high school teachers using iPads.

Chris and Alison in PE have been using various apps on the iPads to have students create fitness videos, analyze technique in various sports, and follow personalized workout videos. In one of his English classes, Mark used an app called Equity Maps to help chart and record the participation level of students during in-class discussions. Nomer recently had his AP Art class use a photo-editing app called PicsArt to create some amazing images that the students wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. See the example by Alexandra Sylte to the right. Nomer said the photo of the model (another AP Art student) was taken in the make shift studio. The representational symbols were added in PicsArt along with complicated masking and erasing manipulation.

One iPad app that is very popular in education today is called Explain Everything. This app has great potential to support students and educators in the learning process. The Explain Everything app allows teachers and students to generate and publish vignettes or video expositions of their understandings, and demonstrate proficiency in applying such knowledge to real situations. These videos can be used for formative or summative learning processes; they can also be shared among classes to help students learn from each other and the teacher in a flipped class sort of way. How you use it really depends on the need, the learning activity, and the learning goals at hand.

With her IB Year 1 SL and HL Biology students, Polly recently had the students do a formative learning activity, using Explain Everything on the iPads (the lesson was inspired from a similar lesson presented on this site). The students were studying the properties of water. Many stations were set up in the classroom through which the students rotated. Before going through the stations, the students, working in pairs, created and labeled a new slide in Explain Everything for each station. As they went through each station, students collected short videos and images about the property of water that they placed on each respective slide in Explain Everything. The next lesson after reading more about the properties of water, the students then recorded narration in Explain Everything where they explained the properties of water they investigated. Once complete, the students exported the videos directly from the app to a Google Folder Polly had shared with them. Here are a couple of examples:

This app is great for all classes. The sky is the limit as to how you use it with your students. If you would like to learn more about and/or give it try, let me know.