341 - An iPad Year in Review

Day 341. During 2014 our Year 5 and 6 students have been part of a 1:1 BYO iPad program, which has been largely quite successful. I still think we have lots of unrealised potential for what we should be expecting kids to do with those devices, but for the first year of the program it's been a great success.

We will start off the incoming students for next year with an information session about the iPad program, so I thought it would be a good idea to ask a few of our current students for their advice about being an iPad enabled student.  I asked them three simple questions and collated their answers in this short video...

195 - Blog Makeover

Day 195. First day back at work today and I spent a good chunk of it doing a blog makeover to all our junior school class blogs. Our junior school teachers have really embraced the use of blogs as a communication tool with parents this year and have been great at adding content, but the overall look and feel of the blogs used the standard Blogger defaults and was visually all over the place.

While I did not want to squash their creativity, we had a chat about it at the end of last term and agreed that we could probably redesign the blogs in a way that gave them some consistency without making them all look exactly the same.  The end result is that they are structurally identical, but visually different by using different coloured themes and the kids' own artwork, and I think it works well as a design idea.

101 - Summit View

Day 101. Next week my school plays host to the Sydney Google in Education Summit, and we have a whole bunch of teacher coming to visit. Although it's holiday time, I thought it would be nice to get the students to welcome out visitors and tell them a little about how we use Google Apps at PLC, so I put together this very short welcome video.

If you're coming to the Summit, spoiler alert, you will see this again there. If not, here'a a word from the kids...

056 - BYO iPads Information for Parents

Day 56. Our school is launching a BYOD iPad program for our Year 5 and 6 kids this year. Tonight we held a parent information evening where I was asked to speak to the parents about the reasons, rationale and strategy for its implementation. We thought it would be a good idea to record the session for any parents unable to attend, so I decided to make it my daily create for today.

The slides were created in Apple Keynote for OSX, then exported to a PDF file and imported into SlideShare.com. The audio was made with a Rode lapel mic plugged into my Nexus 4 phone, and recorded with an Android app called Easy Voice Recorder. The audio file was then transferred from my Nexus 4 to my Mac using a wireless file transfer app called AirDroid, edited in Audacity, then uploaded to SlideShare and synced to the slides with their slidecasting feature.

Sadly, slidecasting in SlideShare is about to be discontinued on Feb 28. I don't know of another service that does this syncing of slides and audio, and I have used the feature quite a bit in the past so I'm disappointed to see it go.