One if the first tasks I had when I started in my new role was to help staff use the school LMS. The staff were familiar with it and had been using it for about 18 months however as their thoughts moved to the upcoming year ahead it was timely to revisit their use of it.

However I was brand new, no one knew me and importantly I did not know much about the staff. This meant running formal workshops or mandated sessions based on things I thought were useful was not going to be a good way to approach this. So Snag A Shelly was born. Announced at morning briefing to many giggles staff could book me for 30 minutes at a time where they could work 1:1 or with a small group of their choosing to have their questions answered, to have specific help setting up pages or time to explore how elements can be used for and why/how.

When the Head of the Chinese Language faculty approached me with an idea it was pretty exciting. Her team had allocated some time at the start of every lesson to do some engaging, fun language activities that got the students engaged and ready to launch into their learning. The idea was to use that time to connect with digital resources.

So we started by introducing staff to 3 tools they could build games, quizzes and activities in - Quizlet, Kahoot and Blabberize - with a key feature being that they could all run in Chinese. This meant the staff could explore ones of interest, making and sharing resources between classes.  The next step was to teach the students to make resources so they could start adding to the games available - all whilst practicing and refining their Chinese language skills! 

The task involves a series of 4 activities that occur over 1 day that enable students to answer the central question  Are we really that different to our iPads? They include 

• Learning Activity 1 - Robot Teacher. Learning Intentions  include to simulate the process of making steps, evaluating and refining them for clarity and to explore similarities and differences between human behaviour and algorithm behavior 
• ​Learning Activity 2 - Imagine if… -  in Science. Learning Intentions  include introducing the concept of branching in context of current learning in Science

• Learning Activity 3 - Tic Tac Toe - in PE. Learning Intention is to introduce the concept of iteration
• ​Learning Activity 4 - Hopscotch coding - bringing the day together. Learning Intentions focusses on students working in Hopscotch to draw together the concepts of steps, branching, iteration and  coding    

Each activity has reflection prompts for the students to completes. The key Learner Profile attributes developed are knowledgeable, thinker, inquirer and reflective. 

We invited Russell to Skype with the VCD class . After showing us the car (he was in the workshop, we were in the classroom)  and explaining the innovative use of carbon fibre the students asked him questions generated prior to the meeting and were able to access the design documents of a real life project.

The ideas in this Skype session  were then used by the students to explore their responses to Unit 3, Outcome 2 in VCD. The insight and real life application meant the students responses were rich and there was evidence of real engagement with the engineer and subsequently the concepts meant so much more. 

Interestingly Russell Gallagher Chief Engineer had a team of capable, interested and talented young designers to bounce new ideas around with in Melbourne, Australia. In a place where the car industry is in decline  a generation of learners who understand the impact of carbon fibre, understand the implications of sustainable and technical design processes and can be inspired to contribute to this process gives some hope to future innovation in this field. ​

Above - Quick 5 minute class discussion norm list based on usual classroom expectations

Right - A sample of student's Piktochart summary  

What is Diigo?
Diigo is a cloud based, free tool that allows learners to annotate websites, PDF's, JPG's  online adding colour and notes to help them develop their understanding and to engage with content. Annotated notes are them stored for later reflection and development and can be shared between users. 

What do I need to set up before using it in class? 
Each student needs to set up an account (free) using an email and password. This will need to be verified so students must use a valid email. They can use it on Chrome or the App or another tablet. Just search Diigo extension on the device and install it. Setting this up could be a good 1 minute legend task. See this post http://www.whatnextshelly.com/explore/1-minute-legends 

Source - Dumbo Feather Conversation - Julian  Burnside, Nov 2013 

Option 1 - read, annotate, share 

Set up students in Diigo and use a prompt screen like the one below to guide them through the tasks you want them to do. 

Set up a class Diigo link and share. Then you can work together through the task! Students work collaboratively on a single document, highlighting terms and ideas they want defining in yellow, responding and building capacity using post it notes to respond to these yellow terms. Thinking prompts are in green and are input by the teacher prior to sharing the resource. Students respond using post it notes as well. All work is attributed to the student user automatically. Students can also add personal thoughts and private musings for themselves whilst reading. And bets if all all the notes, ideas and discussion points are saved for future reference. Check it out in action below. 

Tips:

• show students how to share some things and keep others private and set expectations around what you want shared/private 
• students may want to complete  a reflection after the reading collaborative session - why not include the link and a piece to camera reflecting on what challenged them, what they connected with and what they now want to explore to support the learning 

The App also scaffolds the thinking and planning that goes into an interview - the why, the how and the what - along with providing some inspirational, humorous and thought provoking interviews to get excited by! 

Recently I was discussing with a colleague how they could work smarter - they had so much testing they did and whilst the data helped them inform their teaching, the corrections detracted from the time they had to prepare for the next phase of learning. So I worked with them to explore the possibility of using Socrative to run pre and post numeracy tests. We selected 2 tests from different topics and got started exploring. 

Click on an image above to view the tests we explored - Place Value & Money 

To start the test enter the following room number 55ced47a

App picker using Random Name Generator Lite (free) 

When enhancing learning through iPads in the classroom there will come a time when the students will get so savvy they won't know which App to use for the task they have been given - they will be confident across many! So to help I created a very simple App generator based on the type of tasks the students were doing so they could use this to quickly pick an App to use and get moving with their learning.  

The App can also be set up to randomly generate writing topics, circle time topics,  activities for reading journals etc 

1 min experts - students teaching students (and the teacher!) 

When using an App for the first time I often ask the students to become 1 minute experts. They have 10 minutes to explore an App or in some cases an aspect I want them to find out more about in a particular App and then they have 1 minute to share what they know with their peers. They use the Apple TV to flip their screen up to show us what they know either as the do it in the App or to flip up their notes or ideas they identified. Here is an example of the task Year 5 students completed earlier this year using Lino. 

Ask an expert board - created using Padlet 

A great way to empower students  as facilitators of learning for themselves and others is to set up an expert board. That way when you discover students who are excelling at using a certain App or who know when or why to use it they can be called upon for this. I ask any student who thinks they are ready to be an expert to summarise in 1 minute what they know. If they showcase  a solid understanding they go onto the board. If they do not they get to have another go in a weeks time. There is no reason you could not add teacher to this as well - then teachers could call on other teachers to help them explore and learn! 

This idea also has the added bonus of providing students an audience to present to thus developing confidence in their ability to communicate and also empowers learners in the classroom to be more active in their problem solving rather than just relying on the teacher. And what a way to make the classroom learning student centred! Sitting with this kind of set up are some circle time discussions about how we ask for help, how we support others (learn with rather than learn for) and when we ask peers vs when we ask teachers. 

As a side the board is created using Padlet and only the owner of the board (in this case the teacher) can add/edit names. You can make this accessible by embedding it in a class Edmodo or as is the case for this one via a QR code.  That way when students need help they can scan the QR code, find out who can help them and visit them - and they already have their iPad with them! It is another way students can interact with their learning space.