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.