Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Today was a big day! (For me anyway...)

Today in my Organic Chemistry Class we fired up the iPads for the first time!  I told my students I expected complete failure.  Something just had to go wrong, I was sure.  Would the WiFi in the room work with all of those iPads at once?  Would the checkout system work?  Would some student drop an iPad?  Would it take forever to  check them back in?  Would the students think the whole project is stupid?

Well, practically nothing went wrong at all!

When I had them log in and go to the web, all were able to, yay!

I decided to start by playing a "team building exercise".  My high school Science teacher buddy Jeff Orlinsky at Warren High School told me about the app called "SpaceTeam."  It is for 2-4 players and can be done over WiFi or BlueTooth.  The team members have to perform multiple functions to keep their spacecraft flying.  One team member gets instructions that he or she must tell the other team member, who performs the actual task.  It gets pretty nerve wracking and team members must learn to depend on each other.  Now these are sophisticated college students planning on becoming doctors and engineers.  They seemed to love the game, uh, exercise, and I had a hard time trying to get them to stop and do "real" science.

I told them that I wanted them to learn how to use the app "TouchCast".  This is one of many free "Screen casting" apps.  This app allows the creator to integrate features such as video, whiteboards, stills, audio, and much more into a single multi-media presentation.  Each student was directed to get their own TouchCast account so that when they uploaded their presentations I could easily find them.  I also created a google form and emailed that link to them.  They were simply to put the url of their TouchCast page onto the form.  The form then generates a spreadsheet which I can easily access.

They spent the lab period doing their experiment (re-crystallization) and at the same time practicing with TouchCast on the iPads.  They seemed to be pretty occupied with the whole experience.

Although I do not have a whole lot to show for my day in terms of a finished project, the day went much smoother than I ever imagined.

Here is one of the first TouchCast videos created by one of my students.

One student used both his iPhone and one of the iPads to create this video of the experiment.  I believe it was mostly with his Phone.




Sunday, August 25, 2013

Setting up the new iPads

I will not forget July 9 2013.  That was the "birth" of my iPad journey.  That was the day that I received the shipment of the 60 iPads, 2 carts, 8 MacBooks, 2 Apple TVs and many connectors and cables and adaptors.  I immediately set to work.  For the next two days I unpacked all of the boxes and put everything in its proper place.  This took me about five hours.  We found a secure store room and locked the iPad carts and cabled them to the cabinets in the store room.

Two Big Hurdles

Now that the iPads were charged and organized they had to be set up electronically.  This process required decision making power that was outside my authority.  So here were the two big questions:  How were the iPads going to be initialized and secondly, how were new apps going to be put onto the iPads.  In the original proposal I wrote to my dean, I built in 50 dollars per iPad worth of paid for apps.

Apple has what it calls the Volume Purchase Program.  Many of the app writing companies have an agreement with Apple to sell 20 or more "copies" of their app at half price.   Apple sells vouchers that are redeemed through a special website.  It is best explained here.  But in a nutshell, after the voucher is redeemed for a certain number of copies of a certain app, the purchaser receives a set of codes that can then be used to purchase the apps from the iTunes store.  The vouchers must be used at the volume purchase website and  not iTunes. Also, not just anyone can redeem the voucher.  Each school must have a designated person with a school email and password that allows the purchaser to redeem the voucher.  This person is called the "facilitator."  So my campus had to decide that I was going to be one of the facilitators.  But we also needed what Apple calls a "project manager."  At our meeting we decided who we wanted the project manager to be.  All this person does is acknowledge who are the facilitators.  We opted to choose and academic dean to be our project manager rather than a person from the business/purchasing side.  We believe that it is the academic folks that should be making the top decisions.  Apple has a real nice webinar that explains this real clearly.  I watched it a couple of times.


Saturday, August 24, 2013

Writing a Proposal

When writing my proposal I had to take three things into consideration.

1) Why do I want to use iPads in my classroom?
2) How will I use iPads in my classroom?
3)  What does my dean, who holds granting authority, need to see in my proposal so that she will grant me the funds?

Here is the finished product of my proposal.  I did it really fast in about four or five drafts over three or four days in April 2013.

Trust

I think the key to the whole thing was not just my proposal but my relationships.  My dean and especially the secretary that is administering things trusted me.  I think the key is trust.  I have been building on these relationships for years not knowing that the trust that has grown would ultimately be what brings forth the fruit.  This is not a manipulative sort of relationship.  This is just (hopefully) good people doing good work day in and day out.  The result is a trust.  Many of my colleagues do not take the time to go and talk to the dean and secretaries and then they wonder later why there is not an automatic trust when it is needed to accomplish a task.  Now I don't go "downstairs" to talk to people just so that someday they will give me what I want.  I just go because I like to talk to people and work on problems together rather than in isolation.  Well it pays off in unexpected ways.  The pay off is not for me.  The benefit is ultimately for my students.  I think in many ways that trust is a "good" that is its own end, something worth pursuing for its own sake, but going deeper on that subject is perhaps for another blog.

In the process of writing the proposal for my dean, my colleague Cheryl said, "Jeff, ask for 60 iPads, I want to be in on this too."  Now Cheryl has been a mentor to me for 16 years so I happily said yes.

Second Guessing

Many times early on I asked myself, "Do I really want to do this? This is going to take so much time!"  Now comes the selfish part.  I have been doing a lot of reading and going to conferences on the future of education.  I also read the book recently Who Moved my Cheese? Things are changing in education. At the time of this writing I am 48 years old.  I have a lot of semesters ahead of me, I hope.  I need to change.  Sometimes I wonder if "Bricks and Mortar" schools are going to go the way of Borders Bookstore.  So I decided that iPads is a good way to go.  But I have had a lot of second thoughts!

It's not about the technology....mostly.

When I first came to Cerritos College in the late 1990s the then College President billed Cerritos as "The Most Technologically Advanced College in the State."  Now nobody knew if this was true, but we almost unconsciously tried to grow into that moniker.  Much of our staff development was geared toward technology.  And one wise old friend, Kent Colbath, always said "Technology does not drive content; content drives technology."  I have always leaned on that statement.  But having said that, technology will allow us to go places that were never possible before.  It is sort of like how the growth in technology from a covered wagon to a Ford Model A to a 1967 Ferrari 275 GTB/4 Berlinetta.  The Ferrari just gets you places you could not go in a covered wagon.  And it is much more fun too! So, yes it is all about the destination (learning chemistry!), but maybe the destination has changed just a little because the vehicle will take us where we could not previously have gone.

Why do this?

So where is the "there" that a Ferrari (iPad) can go that a covered wagon (books, pencil and paper) cannot?  After reading the books that I have posted as my favorite books on technology in education I have learned that technology can do two big things better than before.  We can soon begin to apply the algorithms used by websites like Google and Amazon to "individualize their marketing to our specific marketing "needs" to a student's individual educational needs and goals.  Technology will also allow students to "master" content before they move to the next level rather than move on after they have simply sat at a desk for a particular period of time.  I think mastery of content knowledge could really move us forward.

The second big thing that technology can do is what interests me the most and is what drives me to use iPads: the development and fulfillment of creativity.  My big goal with iPads is to have my chemistry lab students create new ways of presenting the information they generated in the lab.  Right now my lab reports are all hand-written in duplicate and can be up to 10 pages long.  I make them right detailed scientific discussions that analyze their results and integrate the practical lab findings with the chemical and physical theory behind the experiment.  My goal this semester is to have my organic chemistry lab students create multi-media lab reports or iBooks.  This can be done very well with the iPad and appropriate apps, like "Showme", "Touchcast", "iMovie", or "Bookpress" just to name a few.  So my main focus is going to be on the organization, creation and presentation of scientific reports using the iPad.

Most teachers know of Bloom's taxonomy.  Recently I found a modified Bloom's Taxonomy that elevated creativity to the highest level.

My colleague Cheryl Shimazu is mainly interested in the content uses of the iPad.  She is going to be using apps that illustrate molecules.  In her General Chemistry class she wants to use the iPads to illustrate concepts like the shapes of molecules and their bond angles.  There are lots of apps out there to do that.

Ok, one more thing.  I am in the middle of my career.  I have a long way to go.  I could start to "mail it in".  But I think I would be really bored.  And I don't think I would be doing much good for my students.  I have found that using these new tools to help students develop deeper creative and analytical skills has lit my own creative fire.  I am at times exhausted, trepidatious, and in way over my head, but I am having a delightful time of creating new (for me) ways of teaching and learning. I really enjoy watching the students go to a higher level than they thought possible.  Overall, I feel energized by being creative myself.  I have no problem saying I believe in a Creator God who created us to be creators ourselves.  In that understanding, I find tremendous fulfillment.

Some first steps at creations

In the Spring of 2013 I told my Organic Chemistry students that I wanted them to create a "digital lab report."  I was bad.  I gave them very little parameters.  I told them that they need to cover the same material as a written lab report in the same depth but it needs to be done electronically.  And by that I told them that I did not want a PowerPoint or Word doc.  I did not tell them how long to make the report or exactly how to do it.  I said they could use pictures, video, voice etc.....Go!  Here are some of the results:  here, here, here, here.  I was quite impressed with their efforts and resourcefulness.  I had many more that were just as good.  When I saw how well they explained these difficult concepts I was hooked.  I showed them to my colleagues at a division meeting and they were very impressed too.  I believe that when they use their voice to explain difficult concepts it is a demonstration that they possess the knowledge. Talk about assessment!  I do not plan on getting rid of writing detailed lab reports.  I highly value writing.  But I plan to balance it out with multi-media reports done on the iPads. When I asked the students about the experience, they said it was very hard.  The hard part was learning the technology like Camtasia for example.  But they felt like they really understood the chemistry at a new level.  I am hoping that the iPads will ease the technology difficulty so that they can really focus on presenting the science.

What?

Here is what my college ordered for me and my colleague through our stem grant:

60 iPads
2 smart carts
8 MacBooks (two to run the iPads and six for students to edit video and create iBooks.)
2 Apple TV devices (these are to connect the iPads with the projector in the classroom.)
All of the supporting cables and connectors.

The price was around 1000 per iPad.

How?

As I said above, my main use of the iPads is as a tool to help students create content.  My colleagues main goal is to have students utilize and manipulate content which already exists on various apps.  My proposal outlines more of the details.




y do this?




Friday, August 9, 2013

Starting off on the iPad journey

Why do this?

I have been teaching chemistry for  25 years and I realized the times are changing fast!  So I decided to take the plunge into the foreign world of technology.  I say foreign because I am not a "digital native."  But really it is not so foreign.  In my life outside of teaching chemistry at a 2-year college in Southern California I like to build my own furniture.  In woodworking I use lots of tools.  That is the way I look at technology in the class room.  It is a tool to help construct something just like I use a table saw to help construct a chair.  In the chemistry classroom I am helping to construct minds.

iPads seem to me to be an outstanding tool to help my students learn chemistry.  This blog will be a chronicle of my experiences using iPads in the classroom.  I plan to talk about the failures and the victories.  I hope to share new insights for those that choose to try this tool in the future and hopefully I will be able to encourage those that are a little afraid to take the chance.

I am going to include some of the "boring details" since that might help someone else who wants to do something similar to what I am doing.

How I got started with iPads in the classroom.

I got my first iPad in 2010 and immediately saw the value of it for the classroom.  I started using screencast technology to put out "mini lectures" that my chemistry students could use to review short concepts or learn the material better.  For years I have heard my students say, "Can you please repeat what you just said?"  Screencasting helps put out quick review lessons.  Using an app on the iPad, I can write on a small "whiteboard" while I record my words.  This can be done so easily it is quite fun.  If a student emails me a question I can answer it with a screencast and post it for all my students to see. I like to use ShowMe, but their are many other good screencasting apps.  Here is my ShowMe page.



I remember a student about 15 years ago asked me in an email to explain some particular chemistry concept.  I needed to write out a chemical equation with subscripts and chemistry symbolism but was unable to in a short time to send over an email.  At the time I wished there was a way to write directly onto the screen rather than typing.  I went to the "tech guy" on my campus and he told me about tablet technology and Camtasia.  So into the sound booth I went for several hours at a time writing on a tablet, hoping I did not go over the time limit.  Then the little videos had to be rendered into a codec that was postible on my website.  Here is the result of what I called my "Mini web lectures".  I did those from about 2002 to 2006.  It took a loooong time.  And then the codec is outdated so it is not always compatible. But THE STUDENTS LOVED IT!  I even had students from other professors rave about the web lectures.  But then my tech guy found another job and I was unable to create any more.  Then in 2010 I get this iPad that I can do my web lectures in just a matter of minutes!


In the Spring of 2011 I got an iPad 2.  As a member of the California Teacher Advisory Council a branch group of the California Council on Science an Technology, I was given an iPad along with the rest of the council.  We were charged with the task of exploring its use in the classroom.

Yikes!  What did I get myself into!

One day in April 2013 I was walking down a hallway and ran into one of our Science Engineering and Math Division secretaries.  She asked me, "If you could buy anything for your classroom what would it be?"  I very flippantly replied, "I would want 30 iPads!"  She then told me to write up a proposal.  Yikes!  what did I get myself into!