By Andrew Marcinek, Edutopia.org

While it’s a tad early for a back-to-school list, Andrew Marcinek and Edutopia.org share five applications for the iPad that will take the place of student supply lists. View the blog article here.

CLICK HERE to visit and follow this frequently updated Twitter feed for a host of recommended iPad apps, tutorials, and tips related to education and lessons for the classroom.

By Sandra Tan, BuffaloNews.com

In the long history of technology innovation, the iPad is an infant. But since its unveiling three years ago, the skinny, 10-inch wonder device has been transforming education at every level. It’s changing how teachers teach and improving how students learn.

The improvement has been so dramatic that – despite the cost – some schools have begun issuing iPads to every child. Read the rest here.

By Monica Burns, Educator and Blogger, ClassTechTips.com

There are so many tools that educators can use to get students interested and engaged in their work. Like most teachers today, I integrate technology into my instruction everyday. I’m lucky to work in a school with one-to-one technology and use iPads with my students throughout every school day. That makes it easy to use QR codes in my classroom — and there are many reasons I love using QR codes!

What is a QR Code? Read the rest here.

Graduating with Technology by LearnStuff.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at http://www.learnstuff.com/graduating-with-technology/.

As most high school students are gearing up for summer break, many teachers and administrators are planning and prepping for the next school year. Part of their planning may include strategies to integrate technology in the classroom through digital textbooks, gaming and social media.

On May 8, the nonprofit Edutopia released “How to Create Social Media Guidelines for Your School.” The free guide, released during Teacher Appreciation Week, is part of a collaboration with Facebook. “Without having a plan and a focus on how you’re going to go about incorporating social media, you’re potentially going to find that you’re not able to reap the benefits,” says Cindy Johanson, executive director of The George Lucas Educational Foundation, which produces Edutopia.

The guide lists steps teachers should take to introduce a formal social media policy—a document that states, in very specific terms, how teachers and students should behave while using social media. The Edutopia primer includes examples from various schools, such as Minnesota‘s Minnetonka Public Schools social media policy, which explains how teachers should protect confidential information, ensure the safety of students online, and more.

Besides examples of policies, the guide also lists seven steps that teachers can take to create a policy and move it through the ranks of school board administrators.

“Instead of starting from scratch, we hope that others can refer to the steps in the primer and also … the real world examples,” says Johanson.

This sharing of ideas is also part of the appeal of social media in the classroom. Teachers can spread ideas beyond their classrooms, and students can collaborate with peers from other classes on projects.

Students and teachers from several classrooms may be able to contribute to a class project, for example, by adding input and ideas via comments on a shared Facebook “group” page. And by following a different set of guidelines from Facebook, teachers can determine the best kind of page to create for a class project—such as a “group” page, which doesn’t require teachers and students to be Facebook friends (and thus perhaps blur relationship lines and even violate the school’s social media policy) to edit the page.

“So often in education, innovation has been isolated within the four walls of a classroom, or within a school district,” Johanson notes. “Thanks to social media, we’re able to share more broadly.”

Students often use social media to collaborate with peers by posting schoolwork on blogs, Facebook, or elsewhere on the Internet, and receiving peer review and contribution, Johanson says.

[Read why the Education Department wants Tweets from teachers and students.]

“It’s much more motivating for students at all levels—especially in high school—to be able to create work, get feedback, and share their work,” Johanson says. “So many educators on the front line are seeing this great opportunity where kids are no longer just creating work for an audience of one—which might have been, in the past, a teacher—but they’re able to produce work that can be shared in a much broader way.”

The reach of social media in the classroom is so broad that it engages not only teachers and students, but it also connects parents to school life, Johanson says.

“Social media creates a much stronger link between the home and the school than we’ve had in the past,” she notes, partially because parents can often see not only their child’s work, but all the “learning that’s occurring in the classroom.”

And although most social media platforms have been around for less than a decade, the parent engagement that it facilitates is a classic, low-tech concept—one that is essential for an effective school, Johanson says.

“A very healthy parent connection and a strong parent collaboration with the school is an important part of being a successful school.”

Read the original article here.

Publishing has gone digital and it’s never been easier for teachers to create high quality and engaging lesson plans for their students. The ability to distribute digital instructional content has been simplified through the new  Association of Alaska School Boards K12 iTunes U site. Through this digital distribution center, your multimedia-rich, place-based/theme-based lesson plans can be delivered directly to student iPads in any school classroom across Alaska, or the world.

The Digital Lessons for Digital Learners (DL2) Contest is an opportunity to turn your lesson plans into digital books and enter them for a chance to win cool prizes for your school and be posted on Alaska’s K12 iTunes U site!

• Grand Prize: Ten iPad 2 tablets with padded cases, Bretford Sync Tray
• 2nd Prize: Teaching Station: One iPad 2, Apple TV, 60” flat screen TV
• 3rd: Prize: One round trip ticket + lodging to ISTE 2012 in San Diego

Watch our video tutorial explaining how Pages can be used to make lesson plans into digital books that can be read on an iPad.

NEXT: Read the DL2 Contest Guidelines and learn How To Enter.

DL2 CONTEST GUIDELINES

1. Send an email requesting entry to cdl.dl2@aasb.org. A link to a Dropbox folder will be provided so you can submit your finished digital lesson plans to us.

2. Develop two digital books according to our for iTunes U guidelines a 1-4 week unit of study: a Teacher’s Lesson Plan and a Student Lesson.

3. Upload completed projects to the Dropbox folder.

4. Submission deadline: April 16, 2012.

5. Prizes to be awarded on May 18, 2012 (dependent on number of submissions)

The Digital Lessons for Digital Learners (DL2) contest is limited to Alaska public school teachers currently employed in an Alaska public school district. The AASB Consortium for Digital Learning (CDL) retains sole discretion for selecting winners and posting qualified entries on iTunes U. Entries will be judged according to the DL2 guidelines and iTunes U technical and copyright specifications to be found posted at the links below and on the Association of Alaska School Boards K12 iTunes U site.

HOW TO ENTER THE DL2 CONTEST

1. Watch our YouTube video tutorial How Create an ePub Digital Book Using Pages to learn how to use Apple’s Pages application to turn your lesson plans into digital books.

2. Download the Sample ePub documents to use as templates for your Lesson Plan Digital Book by clicking on the links below. You will need these documents because they contain Paragraph Styles that are NOT in a regular Pages document. The sample documents include necessary Paragraph Styles and other formatting attributes that are optimized for Pages to export to the ePub format. 

• Sample Teacher Lesson Plan (Pages document)

• Sample Student Lesson (Pages document)

3. Download and review the DL2 Contest Materials by clicking on the links below:

• DL2 Contest Poster (PDF)

• DL2 Contest Guidelines (PDF)

• DL2 Appendix A – ePub Book Structure & Copyright Info (PDF)

• DL2 Appendix B – Contest Scoring Guide (PDF)

• CDL iTunes U Content Providers Guide (PDF)

Questions about the DL2 Contest? Email us

MINNETONKA, Minn. –  Backpacks are lighter this year for ninth graders at Minnetonka High School.

“I have most of my textbooks in iBooks,” said 9th grader Rachel Marks. That not only makes her load lighter, Marks can highlight text and digitally assemble all of her notes in an iBook, something she can’t do in a school textbook. It’s just one aspect of a pilot program Minnetonka High School unveiled this year — to put iPads in the hands of students.

“We’ve long believed in technology as an accelerator of learning,” explained Julie Carter, Executive Director of Technology for Minnetonka Public Schools. The district has been digitizing its curriculum for the past decade, and was looking for a way to put that information in the hands of students. Laptops had drawbacks, including price, so when the iPad came along, Minnetonka took notice, and developed a plan that hinged on a key requirement.  “Identifying a group of students that we could work with to have a controlled experiment where we could see, ‘How does the technology change the learning experience for students?’” said Carter.

Minnetonka started by issuing iPads to half the 9th grade class, and using the other half of the class to compare. Teachers quickly noted some changes for the iPad group.

“Student engagement,” said English teacher Sara Martinson.  “They seem to be more involved in what they are doing.”

The district also saw fewer D’s and F’s in the iPad group, as well as fewer late and missing assignments.  Armed with that information, the district proceeded to give iPads to the other half of the ninth grade.

Now, teachers are incorporating the iPad into daily use.  Science teacher Drew Danner says it doesn’t work for everything, but many applications are proving useful for students, including one that allows students to take tests and have their results recorded in real time.

“Now they can go back on their practice tests or their quizzes and they can look at, ‘Hey, I need to work on this certain set of problems,’” said Danner.

Danner is also able to plug important dates and assignments into students’ Google calendars, which they can pull up on their iPads anytime they want.

Students’ work is saved in “the cloud” so if an iPad should break, or be lost, the work is accessible from any computer or internet device.  Carter says so far, there have been few issues of screens breaking, and no iPads have been lost.

Looming in the future for Minnetonka, the need to purchase new textbooks for two core subjects. At $100 a pop for a traditional copy, Apple’s recent announcement it will be offering more textbooks at $14.99 in iBooks could prove to be a real cost-saver for the district.

If this year’s pilot project continues to go well, Minnetonka hopes to use iPads at the 10th grade level, and continue expanding from there.

Minnetonka has created a series of tutorials for students and teachers to learn how to use and take care of their iPads.

Read original article

Paper textbooks could be a thing of the past as school districts are pushed to go digital. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski challenged schools and companies this month to get digital textbooks in students’ hands within five years.

The Obama administration’s push comes two weeks after Apple Inc. announced it would start to sell electronic versions of a few standard high-school books for use on its iPad tablet. Digital books are viewed as a way to provide interactive learning, potentially save money and get updated material faster to students.

In Wisconsin, many Fox Cities school districts have adopted digital textbooks and are test-driving programs for use of electronics in the classroom.

The Neenah Joint School District launched a program last year that placed iPads into the hands of sixth-graders and selected fifth-graders across the district. The Menasha Joint School District bought HP netbooks for seventh-graders and has halted all purchases of paper textbooks.

Student have responded positively to the new technology, especially since it allows students to learn at their own pace, said Peter Pfundtner, director of technology in the Menasha school district.

“Kids are working on their homework into the wee hours of the night because they want to,” he said. “We forget that kids love to learn if they have some influence over what they’re learning.”

The Appleton Area School District has been committed to a program it calls the Classroom of the Future, which is discussing the best way to introduce digital textbooks and online learning into existing classrooms. Tech integration specialists have been placed in many schools in the district, and more will be added soon, said Kevin Steinhilber, chief academic officer for the district.

“We really see technology as a tool that allows students to access information and more appropriately engage them as learners,” he said. “It allows all students to continuously learn.”

Digital Learning Challenge

Many school districts are considering a Bring Your Own Device-based program that would allow students to bring in a laptop or tablet computer from home to use in the classroom. It’s a cost-effective model for school districts that don’t want to shoulder the cost of replacing digital platforms, but creates a question of access to students who wouldn’t own such a device.

“We have to ensure that all students have access,” said Mary Pfeiffer, Neenah’s school superintendent. “We have to ask, how are we going to support those families that can’t afford the technology?”

Obama’s administration released a 67-page “playbook” to schools that promotes the use of digital textbooks and offers guidance. The administration hopes that dollars spent on traditional textbooks can instead go toward making digital learning more feasible.

About $8 billion is spent annually in the U.S. on textbooks for children in kindergarten through 12th grade, said Jay Diskey, executive director of the school division of the Association of American Publishers. Most paper textbooks are priced at an average of $50 to $175 apiece. Digital textbooks, on the other hand, now hover around $15 apiece.

Diskey said textbook companies have been working for the past five to eight years on the technology to transform the industry, but in many cases, schools simply aren’t ready.

“The industry has embraced this, but the difficulty does lie in the fact that schools are not yet fully equipped with the hardware. We hope that they get there soon,” Diskey said.

Many schools lack the broadband capacity or the computers or tablets to adopt the technology, and finding the money to go completely digital is difficult for many schools in tough economic times.

“For some districts who have not prepared for this, a five-year focus could be very ambitious,” Pfeiffer said.

Appleton Xavier High School, for example, spent $80,000 on an existing wireless network and would have to invest even more to gain an infrastructure that would support digital learning, said ACES/Xavier Educational System President Tony Abts.

ACES/Xavier has embarked on a three-year plan to update technology in its schools. Within two years, it plans on having a laptop computer lab for every 100 students in its schools, spend more than $12,000 to replace computer monitors in elementary schools and add Smartboards to classrooms, at a cost of $1,740 each.

Xavier, whose students are being used to research how best to implement technology, will download two digital textbooks each this year, Abts said.

Support of Teachers Critical

School districts worry about the cost and time commitment that will be required to train educators to use the technology effectively.

“A big piece of the success or failure of such an initiative will be the support of classroom teachers,” Appleton’s Steinhilber said. “They need that ongoing professional development because they haven’t been taught in the same way we’re now asking them to teach.”

Pfeiffer said the Neenah school district will provide professional development assistance for teachers to keep laptops and iPads from becoming “glorified notebooks.”

“The most important app we have is our teacher,” Pfeiffer said. “We need to determine how our teachers can balance the use of technology with social integration in classes.”

But for many school districts, there’s an undeniable pressure at both the federal and state level to evolve.

Students can use the textbooks for video explanations to help with homework, they can interact with molecules, and they can manipulate a digital globe to see stories and data about countries, said Karen Cator, director of the Education Department’s office of education technology.

Much of that capability was showcased Jan. 30 in Wisconsin’s Digital Learning Day, sponsored by the state Department of Public Instruction. It offered real-life applications of online and eBook learning in classrooms.

Menasha school district students were featured in the presentation, which included online learning tools such as an interactive chemistry set or trigonometry assignments online.

“When a student reads a textbook and gets to something they don’t know, they are stuck,” Genachowski said. “Working with the same material on a digital textbook, when they get to something they don’t know, the device can let them explore: It can show them what a word means, how to solve a math problem that they couldn’t figure out how to solve.”

Read original article

As debate continues over whether schools invest wisely in technology — and whether it measurably improves student achievement — Mooresville, a modest community about 20 miles north of Charlotte best known as home to several Nascar teams and drivers, has quietly emerged as the de facto national model of the digital school.

MOORESVILLE, N.C. — Sixty educators from across the nation roamed the halls and ringed the rooms of East Mooresville Intermediate School, searching for the secret formula. They found it in Erin Holsinger’s fifth-grade math class.

There, a boy peering into his school-issued MacBook blitzed through fractions by himself, determined to reach sixth-grade work by winter. Three desks away, a girl was struggling with basic multiplication — only 29 percent right, her screen said — and Ms. Holsinger knelt beside her to assist. Curiosity was fed and embarrassment avoided, as teacher connected with student through emotion far more than Wi-Fi.

“This is not about the technology,” Mark Edwards, superintendent of Mooresville Graded School District, would tell the visitors later over lunch. “It’s not about the box. It’s about changing the culture of instruction — preparing students for their future, not our past.”

As debate continues over whether schools invest wisely in technology — and whether it measurably improves student achievement — Mooresville, a modest community about 20 miles north of Charlotte best known as home to several Nascar teams and drivers, has quietly emerged as the de facto national model of the digital school.

Mr. Edwards spoke on a White House panel in September, and federal Department of Education officials often cite Mooresville as a symbolic success. Overwhelmed by requests to view the programs in action, the district now herds visitors into groups of 60 for monthly demonstrations; the waiting list stretches to April. What they are looking for is an explanation for the steady gains Mooresville has made since issuing laptops three years ago to the 4,400 4th through 12th graders in five schools (three K-3 schools are not part of the program).

The district’s graduation rate was 91 percent in 2011, up from 80 percent in 2008. On state tests in reading, math and science, an average of 88 percent of students across grades and subjects met proficiency standards, compared with 73 percent three years ago. Attendance is up, dropouts are down. Mooresville ranks 100th out of 115 districts in North Carolina in terms of dollars spent per student — $7,415.89 a year — but it is now third in test scores and second in graduation rates.

“Other districts are doing things, but what we see in Mooresville is the whole package: using the budget, innovating, using data, involvement with the community and leadership,” said Karen Cator, a former Apple executive who is director of educational technology for the United States Department of Education. “There are lessons to be learned.”

Start with math lessons: each student’s MacBook Air is leased from Apple for $215 a year, including warranty, for a total of $1 million; an additional $100,000 a year goes for software. Terry Haas, the district’s chief financial officer, said the money was freed up through “incredibly tough decisions.”

Sixty-five jobs were eliminated, including 37 teachers, which resulted in larger class sizes — in middle schools, it is 30 instead of 18 — but district officials say they can be more efficiently managed because of the technology. Some costly items had become obsolete (like computer labs), though getting rid of others tested the willingness of teachers to embrace the new day: who needs globes in the age of Google Earth?

Families pay $50 a year to subsidize computer repairs, though the fee is waived for those who cannot afford it, about 18 percent of them. Similarly, the district has negotiated a deal so that those without broadband Internet access can buy it for $9.99 a month. Mr. Edwards said the technology had helped close racial performance gaps in a district where 27 percent of the students are minorities and 40 percent are poor enough to receive free or reduced-price lunches.

“Even in the downturn, we’re a seller’s market — people want to buy homes here,” said Kent Temple, a real estate agent in town. “Families say, ‘This is a chance for my child to compete with families that have more money than me.’ Six years from now, you’ll see how many from disadvantaged backgrounds go to college and make it.”

TEAMWORK Cameron Parnian, left, and Gordon Muhlestein pondering a lesson on their school-issued MacBook laptops. Photo: Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times

Mooresville’s laptops perform the same tasks as those in hundreds of other districts: they correct worksheets, assemble progress data for teachers, allow for compelling multimedia lessons, and let students work at their own pace or in groups, rather than all listening to one teacher. The difference, teachers and administrators here said, is that they value computers not for the newest content they can deliver, but for how they tap into the oldest of student emotions — curiosity, boredom, embarrassment, angst — and help educators deliver what only people can. Technology, here, is cold used to warm.

Mooresville frequently tests students in various subjects to inform teachers where each needs help. Every quarter, department heads and principals present summary data to Mr. Edwards, who uses it to assess where teachers need improvement. Special emphasis goes to identifying students who are only a few correct answers away from passing state proficiency standards. They are then told how close they are and, Mr. Edwards said, “You can, you can, you can.”

Many classrooms have moved from lecture to lattice, where students collaborate in small groups with the teacher swooping in for consultation. Rather than tell her 11th-grade English students the definition of transcendentalism one recent day, Katheryn Higgins had them crowd-source their own — quite Thoreauly, it turned out — using Google Docs. Back in September, Ms. Higgins had the more outgoing students make presentations on the Declaration of Independence, while shy ones discussed it in an online chat room, which she monitored.

“I’m not a very social person, but I have no problem typing on a keyboard,” said one of those shy ones, Chase Wilson. “It connected me with other students — opened me up and helped me with talking in public.”

In math, students used individualized software modules, with teachers stopping by occasionally to answer questions. (“It’s like having a personal tutor,” said Ethan Jones, the fifth grader zooming toward sixth-grade material.) Teachers apportion their time based on the need of students, without the weaker ones having to struggle at the blackboard in front of the class; this dynamic has helped children with learning disabilities to participate and succeed in mainstream classes.

“There are students who might not have graduated five years ago who have graduated,” said Melody Morrison, a case manager for Mooresville High School’s special education programs. “They’re not just our kids anymore. They’re everybody’s kids — all teachers throughout the school. The digital conversion has evened the playing field.”

Many students adapted to the overhaul more easily than their teachers, some of whom resented having beloved tools — scripted lectures, printed textbooks and a predictable flow through the curriculum — vanish. The layoffs in 2009 and 2010, of about 10 percent of the district’s teachers, helped weed out the most reluctant, Mr. Edwards said; others he was able to convince that the technology would actually allow for more personal and enjoyable interaction with students.

“You have to trust kids more than you’ve ever trusted them,” he said. “Your teachers have to be willing to give up control.”

That was the primary concern that the 60 visitors expressed during their daylong sojourn to Mooresville in November. “I’m not sure our kids can be trusted the way these are,” one teacher from the Midwest said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid trouble back home.

Thomas Bertrand, superintendent of schools in Rochester, Ill., said he was struck by the “culture of collaboration among staff and kids” in Mooresville and would emphasize that as his district considered its own conversion.

“There’s a tendency in teaching to try to control things, like a parent,” said Scott Allen, a high school chemistry teacher in South Granville, N.C. “But I learn best at my own pace, and you have to realize that students learn best at their own pace, too.”

CURIOSITY Backpacks line a hallway at East Mooresville Intermediate, a favorite stop of educators. Photo: Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times

Mooresville still has some growing pains. In one ninth-grade social studies class, a video that easily could have been shown on a large screen instead went through the students’ laptops, several of which balked, “Unable to find proxy server.” One fourth grader, having to complete 10 multiplication questions in two minutes for the software to let her move on, simply consulted her times tables, making the lesson more about speed typing than mathematics. And those concerned about corporate encroachment on public schools would blanch at the number of Apple logos in the hallways, and at the district’s unofficial slogan: “iBelieve, iCan, iWill.”

Mooresville’s tremendous focus on one data point — the percentage of students passing proficiency exams — has its pitfalls as well. At November’s quarterly data meeting, there were kudos for several numbers whose rise or dip was not statistically significant, and no recognition that the students who passed by one or two questions could very well fail by one or two the next time around. Several colorful pie charts used metrics that were meaningless.

“I realize the fallacy of looking at one measure,” Mr. Edwards said in an interview afterward. “We look at scholarships, A.P. courses taken, honors courses, SAT scores. But the measure that we use is what the state posts, and what parents look at when they’re comparing schools moving here.”

After three years of computers permeating every area of their schooling, Mooresville students barely remember life before the transformation and are somewhat puzzled by the gaggle of visitors who watch them every month. (“At times it’s kind of like being a lab rat,” one 11th grader said.) But Mooresville understands its growing fame in the world of education, much of which has yet to find the balance between old tricks and new technology.

“So,” Ms. Higgins asked her English class after the bell rang, “you think you’re going to like transcendentalism?”

“Only if you’re a nonconformist,” a student cracked.

Read original New York Times article