Haiku Deck—Presentations Made Simple with an App

The free app Haiku Deck gets applauds from publications such as TIME and The Wall Street Journal. The word is that using the “fiendishly simple” Haiku Deck, you and your students can create beautiful presentations (called decks), which are both clean and concise.  Be sure to browse through Haiku Deck’s Gallery of Featured Decks, especially Book Reports: iPad Style. Decks can be shared on Facebook and Twitter and through email—and it’s fun to use.

What Study Techniques Really Work?

In research led by Professor John Dunlosky, Kent State, thousands of articles evaluating study techniques were examined. The result was a list of the Best and Worse ways to learn.

Okay, first the techniques to avoid: highlighting, underlining, rereading and summarizing. We are probably having our students learn all of these, but maybe that’s not such a good idea. The only good thing about these methods, according to the research, is that they get students to read the content.

Now for the Best: The top technique is spreading out studying of the material over a period of time. The opposite of this would be cramming. The second best is practice testing—frequently, and not for a grade, which can be accomplished with flashcards and using apps “like Quizlet, StudyBlue, and FlashCardMachine.”

Other study practices that are okay but not great include: mental imagery, asking “why” while reading, explaining to yourself what you are reading when you are reading, using keywords or clues to remember, and “mixing up different types of problems.”

But I Spent Hours on It!

Here’s another factoid that is good for teachers to have at their fingertips -  did you know that Microsoft Word has a little-known feature called total editing time?  This is a good way to monitor how long kids are spending on a writing assignment and it works like this: when you start working on a new Word document, a timer starts, and once you save the document, the time consumed thus far is saved as the ‘total editing time’. You continue to work on the document, and save it again, and the time elapsed since the last save is added to the total editing time or how long a kid has spent on an assignment.  Now, when a student says “but I spent hours on this,” it can easily be verified.

What Really Is A Flipped Classroom?

Flipped classrooms? The catch phrase is confusing. The correct definition seems to be a classroom in which students go over the content to be covered before they come to class. They have the material available to them to learn at their own pace and they can go back and review it whenever they want to throughout their course. This content is online, often in the form of videos prepared by the teacher or an education publisher. The idea is to encourage students to take charge of their learning. Shelley Wright, in “The Flip: End of a Love Affair” tells how she became enamored and “unenamored” with her flipped classroom. That’s because, although she says that “flipping” helped her students, she saw that they were able to take an even larger part in their learning.  If the teacher or a publisher is preparing the content to be learned, it is, according to Wright, almost the same as giving a lecture. So—with the Flipped Classroom, can teachers be a guide on the side or are they simply a sage on the video stage? Are students capable of critically evaluating their own sources, or do they need teachers to provide them?  Shouldn’t teachers as guides help students to use the best sources? Even Wright provides what she calls a “rudimentary outline” of concepts to be learned.  Personally, I envision, perhaps incorrectly, the flipped classroom was what Wright is talking about—a combination of ways to help students take charge of their learning combined with group work and teacher attention to the needs of individuals.  No matter what the catch phrase, flexibility is the key as we search for what will work best for our students.

What Can You Do with an iPad in the Classroom?

Tom Barrett, in his 103 Interesting Ways to Use an iPad in the Classroom, has developed a presentation with tips and ideas for teachers. You can browse his tips and tips contributed by other educators through a Google Docs presentation, and you can add your own ideas if you wish. Barrett wants to keep track of how people are using the resource and urges you to email him or tweet him @tombarrett.

Ideas Related to iPad Programs

A January 2012 NBOA (National Business Officers Association) Webinar, “iPad Programs: Expensive Paperweights or Money Saving Game Changer?”, detailed information of use to schools considering digital notebook use by students.  Some of the topics covered included, introducing iPads grade by grade, making sure you have a robust Wi-Fi network, having tech support available, giving adequate time to both staff and student learning related to iPad use, and how iPads are used in one school that has integrated them into Grades 9 and 10. It was interesting that iPad use included much of what is currently being done with laptops and desktops. Computers weren’t needed for teaching, projects, or homework, but a few students brought in their own laptops to use. Presenters covered the myth of the vanishing backpack saying that even though some think that these devices will mean the end of students carrying heavy books, this is not the case at this time. Although novels are available, as are some other books used in coursework, for the most part, etexts or coursework online is not available. The question of whether to go with iPads or Android systems was discussed with the answer favoring iPads because of the numbers already sold, future sales projections, the number of Apps, and the availability of education apps, including 1000+ free education Apps.

Homework, Research & How Students Learn

There has long been an argument about whether students have too much homework or not enough. According to Annie Murphy Paul in The New York Times Sunday Review (09/10/11), if you look through books about education and students, you’ll find some claim that our students are “stressed-out” with schoolwork and others who say that our students can’t keep up with students in other countries because we aren’t challenging them enough.  Paul says that these books are basically about homework, and although time doing homework has risen over the past 30 years, students are not keeping up. So what works? Not busywork, according to parents. New research called Mind, Brain and Education suggests that “spaced repetition” where “learners encounter the same material in briefer sessions spread over a longer period of time” brings strong results. Re-exposing students to content over a semester, for example, enables their minds to store it more effectively. Other methods suggested by the research are “Retrieval Practice”, “Interleaving”, and  “Cognitive Disfluency”. Retrieval Practice is simply self-testing. Bringing the information back through some sort of testing works much better than simply studying. “Interleaving” is creating assignments that don’t have the same types of questions or problem-type situations in them, or in other words, mixing up the content. Students learn more by figuring out what they need to do to complete assignments. “Cognitive Disfluency”, also referred to as “Desirable Difficulties”,  is based on the principle that the more difficult it is to master the content, the better students learn. It doesn’t mean that the content needs to be more difficult, but instead means that “sprinkling a passage with punctuation mistakes, deliberately leaving out letters, shrinking font size until it’s tiny or wiggling a document while it’s being copied so that the words come out blurry” make students work harder to decipher ,and therefore, fix it more securely in their brains. Mind, Brain, and Education research is not calling for teachers to abandon accurate punctuation and grammar or to have students strain their eyes to read, but it is advocating changes in the ways we teach and the homework we give. With technology, we have the ability to use our creativity to develop assignments that will challenge our students and help them put the skills and content they need into their minds.

Project and Assignment Help on Power to Learn

Computers & Homework is an area on Power to Learn for students. The articles, divided into elementary, middle school, and high school categories focus upon helpful hints that include online resources, guidelines for working with tech at home, creating unique projects, and much more. Some of the titles you may want to recommend to your students include: Making Friends with Your Printer, Finding What You Want Online, And Your Survey Says, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Geography, Homework Predicaments Revealed and Resolved, State & Country Reports, What Cheating? What’s Your Responsibility, PowerPoint to Podcasts, and Make a QR (Quick Response) Code Poster. Look for upcoming articles packed with resources for helping your students with mathematics.

Fun with QR Coding

If you don’t know what QR (or Quick Response) Codes are, they are small black and white and sometimes colored squares with smaller squares inside. These squares contain coding for URLs, text and more. If they were in textbooks, for example, you and your students could decipher the codes with smart phones, iPod Touch or desktop computers to find links that would enhance textbook information by leading to additional text info, videos, images, etc. They’d be great for using in student reports or projects, for scavenger hunts, for identifying information in science fairs, art projects, and so much more. Your students will enjoy figuring them out and also creating their own. For ideas how to use them in the classroom and for homework, see Steven W. Anderson’s, “QR Huh? What the Heck Are QR Codes?” The QR Code below asks, “Can you read me?”

Listening in Class While Taking Notes: Good or Bad?

When teachers are lecturing or there’s a class discussion, does taking notes detract from learning? Some educators, like Jacqueline Moloney, Executive Vice Chancellor and Head of Online Learning at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, think so. Although she admits that she loves to take notes, she understands that when doing so, students miss some of the content. The idea is to encourage students to concentrate fully in class sessions while cameras capture through video what’s going on in class. Students can then go back and review lessons as needed. Studies have shown that learning from Podcasts and other videos of lectures can be effective, and if students have the advantage of the live lectures and discussions plus review through technology, they do even better.