Rob's+Journaling+Page

[|Digital Storytelling using the ipad]

http://ipodclassroom.wikispaces.com/

2/14/11 - Journal: Since Ann Sobol has been out on maternity leave, I have been afforded an opportunity to use the iPads in my classes. Since Alden splits the year by semester, I just started using them a little over a week ago. Here goes… My students love using the iPads. They are new and different. The first day, we spent some time just figuring out how they work. We covered things like opening up new tabs when surfing the web, locking the screen, and other items like that. I encouraged them to play with some of the applications. Within moments, many of them had stumbled upon the Speak It app. We had quite a lot of fun. Myself included. Here’s what I like about using the iPads: I use wikis and blogs in all of my English classes. In the past, I have required students to respond to a pre-reading discussion question in their journals, but when we do this, we don’t often get to hear from the entire group. I like using the discussion tab on wikispaces to allow students to respond to a prompt and quickly read what their classmates have written as well. This activity is not meant to take up twenty minutes of a class, which tends to be the case when we use the laptops for these exercises. We spend a great deal of time logging on and loading up. The iPad gets us where we want to go much faster. So far, this is one of the discoveries that I’ve made.