The Week of February 21 - 25

This week I will continue to use the iPads in the same way that I have been using them for the past two weeks.  In fact for activities such as formative assessments I will be using them even more regularly.  Even though it is Monday my class took an informal assessment of what we had learned today using the iPads and by doing this I learned that they needed a little more work on the causes of World War II.

I did take the time to have my students respond to a blog post on my class website about their thoughts on how we are using the iPads in class.  The overwhelming majority stated that they enjoyed using them, but the posts that I was most interested in were the two or three that gave me some constructive criticism.  Here is a link to the class blog post http://teachersites.schoolworld.com/webpages/MrWhitaker/myblog.cfm.  Feel free to read the comments that my students left for me today, or leave your own comment.  I do have to approve all comments before they appear on this site so please be patient if you post.

I do plan to use the video player function of the iPad this week.  I have loaded in three different video clips onto the iPads for my students to watch.  The clips they will be viewing are short biographies on Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo.  After the students view the clips they are to create a Venn Diagram examining the similarities and differences between these three fascist dictators.  Normally we would watch each of the videos together as a group.  Then discuss the clips and how they pertain to what we are learning.  My goal behind watching the video's individually on the iPad is to allow students to stop, rewind, and focus on information that they feel is most important.  Then use the information that they feel is most intersting in the construction of their Venn diagram.

Logistically this activity required a great deal of prep work to get it off the ground.  After I found the videos that I wanted to use they had to be converted to .mp4 format that could be used on the iPads.  I have been collaborating with my ITRT (Pam Hanks) and a colleague at PCHS (Greg Hawks) both of which gave me access to conversion software.  After the video clips were converted they had to be put into each iPad individually which took about 45 minutes. I plan to show how to do this process step by step in a later post so watch out for it.