Luv2Learn

So here I am once again, thinking I can quickly do an assignment and move on to other things on my list. Right! I watched a conference session on itouch in education. My first thoughts as I watched directions for how to take the ipod out of the box (not kidding!) were “I am not going to learn much here – I already know all this.”  It took about 2 minutes before I learned that there was much I didn’t know about the device I was already using. To start – I learned how to password protect my itouch. Didn’t know that was an option before watching the session. Next I learned that you can take pictures with the itouch by pushing the on/off button simultaneously with the round button. Didn’t even know the device could do this! Next I learned about a bunch of the speaker’s favorite apps. You can find them at his website .  From this part on apps I learned about the google mobile app. It gives the user the ability to use voice recognition with searches. You simply have to speak into the device and it will pull up the search for you. No typing on that little keyboard! I didn’t believe I could do that, so of course I had to try it out. It works. I asked for the current temperature in my city and sure enough it produced a weather page with the temperature of 92 degrees. In the session the presenter asked for a  conversion of 27 degrees Fahrenheit to degrees Celsius. It gave an immediate conversion. I couldn’t help think that students could use this application for quick research in the classroom. Dropbox was another neat app. along with storykit and memos. Most of the apps he referred to were free apps – a plus for using them in the classroom.

The next thing I learned about was creating forms in google documents. He showed how to create an itouch form that would permit active forms for students to respond to and then create summary forms in the either spreadsheet or graph form. Click on the itouch form link – when the page opens up click on forms and a drop box will appear. Click on  view active form and you can see the page that allows you to type in your responses. Feel free to fill out your responses and submit and then view the summary sheet to see your name and responses.

What a great tool for the classroom for immediate feedback. Move over Promethean active expressions.  Once created, these forms can be emailed to anyone and they can fill in the form and submit it. Administrators could effectively use this for polling staff or collecting data of varioius sorts. I wonder how much time could be saved in meetings if this one form was used. You can view the form I created in google documents. A pie chart summary form  can be used to analyze the information submitted – under forms dropbox click on show summary of responses.

 What if students took their quizzes on ipod touches and the answers were summarized for the teacher to review and adjust teaching? Might just make for increased student achievement and enhanced teaching. Hmmmm Maybe we will see itouches on the required school supply lists in the near future – not to different from the required graphing calculators that are now on the list!

O.K. I am off to learn more about the the thumb tack microphone so I can consider using memos. For forgetful students this just might be a strategy to help them remember what they need………