Suzanne at the Math Forum

This weekend my son (Lee) showed us an iPad app that he’d found:

Solar Walk – 3D Solar System model
By Vito Technology Inc.

I realize that it’s science but I figure if you’re an elementary teacher you teach science and if you’re a middle or high school teacher you have colleagues who teach science!

What is SO COOL about this app is to think about how it could be used along with the “Notice/Wonder” activity. Imagine that you have a class set of iPads. You’ve downloaded this (free!) app on each of them. You hand them out to the students and just ask them: “What do you notice? What do you wonder?” and just let them wander. Judging from what happened when Lee showed my husband and me this app, we immediately got lost in it — and what was so fun was that we each got lost in a different section. How could you help but learn?

Next would be sharing — best would be if in your classroom you have a way to share what an iPad displays on a classroom display but even if that’s not something you’ve figured out, I can imagine students taking turns talking about what they found.

The planets just come to life in this app. It’s quite incredible!

True confession — I had an Original iPad for over a year and while I thought it was cool, I really didn’t use it as much as I had thought I would. When the iPad2 came out I coveted it thinking that I would love the video capability … but … when I finally thought that I might buy one, there was rumor of a new model and I was patient. At the end of July, I made my purchase. And now I’ve been thinking about

• the one iPad classroom
• best uses of my iPad as compared to my computer
• best uses of my iPad as compared to my iPhone

Second true confession — I’ve heard and read about folks who use readers and this and that to keep track of things and I know that @maxmathforum and others will think … good grief, Suzanne … but I’ve just not been at a point where it seemed like I needed to use anything. I wasn’t ready. I continued using my old ways of organizing myself to try to get in tune with some of the new ways that I was trying to learn about. (Yes, my mind makes an analogy immediately to the classroom. Kids who still count on their fingers. Kids who still use tables. I’ve been counting on my fingers but my “teachers” have been patient with me and believed that I would take another step.)

Why am I confessing, you might wonder? This morning I decided it’s finally time for me to get something to organize the blogs I’ve now found myself gravitating to and instead of just having extra tabs open all the time on my browser or depending on a tweet to remind me of a new post I might want to read, I downloaded Pulse. As soon as I started interacting with that app on my iPad, I knew I had made a good choice. It just seemed so intuitive to me. Here are a few things I did as I set things up:

I made two “pages” – the first one is news, sports news, and general things like that. The second page has blogs that I’m starting to follow. As I get into using this, I may add more pages but, for my purposes at the moment, this is enough. I’ve connected it to Twitter and that feature I find very cool:

(left) The tweets of folks I follow that have included a link to a URL in a recent tweet are included in my scrolling list.
(right) If I click on one of those blocks in the scrolling list, the URL opens to the right.

Often I found myself roaming through tweets thinking that I’ll look at the URLs when I have more time. This way, they’re all gathered in one place. And, if I want to save anything on any of this, I just click the “star” icon in the lower left corner.

My husband brought my morning latte upstairs as I was setting up Pulse on my iPad. I showed him and his reaction told me that this was worth sharing on my blog! As he went downstairs, I heard him say to our son, “Lee, go up and see what your mother found!” We all have third generation iPads and we each use them for different purposes.

With my true confessions this morning I’m hoping it helps some folks who are new to using an iPad, find a way to make things more manageable without getting overwhelmed. As I mentioned in An iPad in Class, Part 1, “easy” is key to making sure that you REALLY use it!

Once I read “The iPad” section on one of Fawn Nguyen’s August blog posts I became curious about Air Sketch. I tried the Free version and 5 minutes later purchased the full version. The reason that the app caught my eye in the first place is that I’ve been thinking of  easy ways to use an iPad in a classroom. My definition of easy includes:

• as soon as I download it, I can make it do some of what it’s advertised to do
• when I try it the second time I can do even more things
• because of all that I can do (without reading directions) I actually take time to read (scan, at least) the directions and I quickly learn even more features

The best part, however, is how I’m thinking Air Sketch can help make the most of an iPad. It reminds me of when I tried to make the most of one computer in a classroom. Air Sketch lets you display on your computer screen what you draw on your iPad – so if we take that one more step, it allows you to display whatever you project from your computer! Fun. Here are some photos I just took at my desk showing my iPad and my computer screen (imagine that my computer is connected to a video projector instead of my monitor):

Step 1: opened Air Sketch on my iPad and a web page in Safari

Step 2: touched the tiny icon in the lower left corner of my iPad screen to open the controls and typed that URL in Safari

Step 3: whatever I draw on my iPad is “mirrored” on my computer screen

Drawing with my finger is fun … but … I’m focused on how to use this in a mathematics classroom and I consider,

• calculations — kinds of things that you might write on a whiteboard — instead you walk around with your iPad and students write on it
• take photos of student work and display
• display PDFs (or photos of papers)
• annotate

With the full version I can access my “camera roll”

Another cool feature is that you can save pages.

So, you could save things from one class to use the next day or you could prepare some pages ahead of time and make them visible when ready.