Paperless Research with iPads

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This MassCUE workshop shared information on how to do a research project using a shared cart of ipads. The presenter, Greg Kulowiec, worked at the high school level but there's much to learn from the process about curating information from the web, sharing content and providing feedback.

The students searched for resources about their topic and captured the information using various apps to allow for local annotation and highlighting on the ipad. They shared this to a class Diigo group (a social bookmarking tool that was setup by teacher) as a means of crowdsourcing the research process.  Each day, students had to upload or send their work to themselves in order to get the content off the shared ipad.  Students' final products, using the Pages app, included varied media sources (audio, video, text and pictures).

Interesting tidbits:

• Goodnotes is a free app for annotating PDFs. Notability is a paid app and has more features. 
• Joliprint or printfriendly widgets can convert web content to PDFs to open in Notability for annotation or iBooks for readability and word look-up (dictionary).
• dotepub.com converts  web content to ebook format and can export notes from iBooks via email.
• Collaborative research is accomplished with Diigo class groups 
• Peer screencasting provides feedback on others' drafts using the Explain Everything app.  Publish to youtube for 24/7 access on a teacher's channel. Students can view at any time. Provides time for students to read and reflect on each other's work. 

Cons:

• On shared devices students have to make sure they have removed or backed-up their day's work to another location such as Google Drive or Dropbox
• Students had to get good at logging in and logging out of multiple accounts within the time constraints of the class.

MassCUE 2012

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WMS teachers attending the MassCUE 2012 conference have created this blog for posting our take-aways.

The goal for the blog is to have all WMS teachers share teaching and learning best practices gleaned from any resource; conferences, articles, workshops, etc.



Format:
We suggest that posts follow this format:

• A Catchy Title
• A description of the learning opportunity (workshop, event, article, book, etc)
• Three-Five bulleted take-aways
• Label/tag your post for easy searching
• Links for greater information. You may add important links related to the event's hand-outs, articles and more. (optional)
• A photo of the event, book, experience or endeavor (optional)

Rationale:

There are many advantages to sharing in this way including the following:

• No educator can go to all events, read every book or research each new idea on the horizon, however if we all share, we'll all benefit from the collective research and effort.
• Writing is an essential life-long learning skill, and this blog will give every educator a platform to try their hand at writing for an audience.  Our audience includes colleagues near and far, the learning community and the community at large.
• Participating in this blog will bring every educator into the tech-age and current communication venues.
• We will get smarter, and our work with children will develop and grow.
• This blog will serve as a one-stop shop for professional sharing.
• This blog will help us to "flip" faculty meetings by giving a venue for professional share to read at your leisure and leaving the faculty meetings and other professional meetings for important conversation, discussion and debate. 

The first time you want to share, you will need to contact Bethann Monahan to gain writing permission.  After that, you'll be able to add a post whenever you're interested.  

Please contact Bethann Monahan if you have further ideas for this blog. 

Thanks to Beth Crozier and Maureen Devlin for sharing this text from HH's blog