Five practical tips for iPad success in the classroom

When embarking on any process involving change it’s vital to prepare your teaching staff and students through communication, encouraging involvement and managing resistance.  Once you have planned your launch, at the stage of initiation the first goal is to build iPads into all daily school activities carried out by educators and learners. Start by ensuring staff begin to transfer daily routine tasks to their iPads and that they don’t relapse if they are pushed for time or other factors make it more appealing to use paper-based options.

The speed and success of the realignment will, however, be dependent on several factors:

• Leadership team’s commitment to the change process (management)
• Ensuring the infrastructure and resources are in place to support students and staff (preparation)
• Communication of the new initiative and prior warning of the switch-over (communication) 
• Staff’s understanding of and ability to demonstrate iPad best practice (training)

At the helm should be at least one senior leader, fully fluent and competent on the uses of iPads in education and who in the beginning can offer support and guidance on successfully transferring daily routines onto an iPad. While here at LearnersCloud we offer exam-tailored GCSE tutor videos that complement staff’s teaching strategies, it’s clear that many attempts to integrate mobile technology in the classroom fail or are at least delayed due to the lack of a skilled and experienced iPad leader. Here’s a simple checklist of iPad good practices that senior leaders must understand if they are to achieve successful integration:

Five everyday iPad practices that staff need to know:

 

Wikispaces classroom – simple, social, student engagement

Many teachers approach social media tentatively when it is presented as a classroom resource. The prospect of students contacting you on your personal profile, the lack of control and moderation of messages and issues of online (cyber) bullying are reason enough. But while we ourselves share these concerns and have posted articles helping teachers to use social media safely in the classroom, our attention was drawn to altogether different social media networking space that some of you may already be using to great effect.

Launched in 2005, the social writing workspace Wikispaces Classroom is an online platform developed solely for the education sector that is gaining more and more support from teaching professionals throughout the world, with more than 14 million individual users.

Taking teaching tips from Sir Alex

In the ruthless world of Premier League football, many managers find their experiences of top flight football to be precariously short.

That fact alone would make Sir Alex Ferguson’s quarter-century an extraordinary feat but, after announcing his retirement on Wednesday evening (9th May), many pundits and sports commentators have hailed his decision as marking the end of an era.

Ferguson’s longevity is far from the most compelling reason for this. Within his 27-year stint as manager of one of the most successful clubs in world football, he led his team to 13 major titles and was the first manager to win the treble in the 1988−89 season.

Shortly after the heroics of the Champions League final – which saw Ole Gunnar Solksjaer and Teddy Sherringham pull back a 1−0 deficit against Bayern Munich in injury time, Sir Alex Ferguson became only the eighth manager to be knighted for his services to football.

Today, Manchester United is one of the wealthiest and most widely supported clubs in the world.

Commenting this week, Prime Minister David Cameron hailed Sir Alex as ‘a remarkable man in British football who has had an extraordinary, successful career.’

At the end of a reign so sustained and successful it is easy to forget how hard-fought the initial victories were and how unlikely their domination that followed was.

Outlasting prime ministers, archbishops and even popes, Ferguson turned the fortunes of a side that hadn’t won a league title in the two decades prior to his appointment.  But what can we learn from his charisma, drive and zeal as a manager, or more so as a leader and trainer?

While many first consider the lessons to be learned from a business sense, there are also tips that we as educators can draw from Sir Alex Ferguson’s departure.

What’s all the fuss over flipped classrooms?

By now, many of you will be familiar with the concept of reversed responsibility learning or flipped learning. As an educator myself, the concept of assigning my students a video to watch, interpret and form questions on in lieu of my class was an enticing offer.

A classroom in which students:

• have an awareness of the lesson topic,
• have attempted to understand the content knowledge,
• develop their own questions to bring back into the class,
• and are ready to engage in active, cooperative learning from the outset.

Too good to be true?

Three phases of integrating technology in the classroom

Any teacher that can be replaced by technology deserves to be.
David Thornburg

Integrating technology is a challenging prospect but it doesn’t have to be. The above quote is important to bear in mind throughout this article as successful integration of technology is as much about the teacher and their ability to bring learning to life as it is about the use of technology.

The three phases of digital integration is not a best-practice checklist but rather an insight into a typical implementation plan.

A teacher’s guide: helping students use Google Search effectively

In this article we consider the Google resources and lesson plans developed to help teachers and educators enhance their learners’ search skills.

Classroom tasks are becoming increasingly digitalised and, with greater access to the internet, teaching professionals are acknowledging the need for students to conduct greater levels of independent study and research. In the recent past, learners would head to their school or local library to refer to journals, newspapers and other literature. Nowadays, the first port of call for the majority will be Google and the somewhat infinite and instant access it offers to literary content.

This has significantly expanded students’ access to information from a wider range of sources, but conversely, it has also increased their access to misinformation and to material unrelated to an exam syllabus.