Subversive Professional Development

This year I have a new job. I'm still at Divine Child High School, but now I am overseeing our 1:1 iPad initiative. This year all of our freshmen have iPads. Next year it will be freshmen and sophomores and we will keep adding a class a year till the entire student body is 1:1. I'm not planning on going into any of the technical details nor do I plan on starting a debate about the best device for a 1:1 deployment. I want to talk about the educational side of my new job.

Besides being responsible for the technical aspects I'm also responsible for staff professional development. I want to share one of the projects I've been helping with. Most of our 9th graders take a class we call Integrated Science. The teachers of this class has never been particularly satisfied with the textbook offerings from the big publishers. So I convinced them to look at what ck-12 has to offer.

ck-12 makes free Creative Commons textbooks. More importantly they allow teachers to take the different materials and assemble them in any way they see fit. So, basically you get to create the textbook you want to match the course you're teaching. Not only can you take the ready made materials, you can also go in and edit them. It's a great way to get started making your own textbooks without having to start from zero. I was able to convince the two Integrated Science teachers to use ck-12 rather than buy a new iPad ready textbook for this year.

I used to teach the course years ago, so I offered to help. ck-12 doesn't really seem to have a way to collaborate very easily so we split the content up. We made a different book for each unit, downloaded as ePubs and put them into an iTunes U course for distribution. Included in each unit in iTunes U are all the other documents and assignments students might need.

From the teaching standpoint having a textbook you made yourself is awesome. However, one problem is you don't have all the associated support materials assembled for you already. For this we are using Google Drive. We have a folder called "Integrated Science Teachers Manual" where we put in the unit overviews and skills/standards and such.

I volunteered to create the first unit for a couple of reasons. The first is that I know a lot more about Astronomy than either of the other teachers, but I also wanted to create a model for them to see what was possible. I tried to make the first unit as student centered as possible with assignments designed to make students use their iPads as both learning and content creation tools.

I call it Subversive Professional Development because the teachers involved have had to get much better at using Google Drive, they've had to learn to build a course in iTunes U, and have had to learn more about the possibilities afforded by having a room full of iPads, all without any formal training sessions. They've also gotten a chance to see how open ended student centered assignments can drive education. My next goal is to track their progress and see if they can keep this up through the rest of the school year.

One of the best parts about this whole process is I've heard from some of the other teachers that they may want to do the same thing once their students have iPads. Needless to say, I am very excited by this prospect. Some teachers in my building are beginning to see that they themselves can dictate their curriculum and use a textbook to support that curriculum rather than the other way around.

Walking the Walk - Creating video for students with only an iPad

Next year my school will begin it's 1:1 iPad program. We're starting slow with only the freshman class, so it will take us four years before we're totally 1:1. I've been tasked with helping get teachers ready for the flood of technology headed our way. One of the ways I've been doing this is through iTunes U courses for professional development. One of these is Flipping with an iPad.

I've been making videos to use with my students for years on my computer with Camtasia Mac using a Bluetooth Wacom tablet and Sankore for annotating on the screen. But these take me a while to make. A lot of this time is spent in the set up. I've been urging some teachers to lecture less in class and to use videos as replacements. I know lecture is not the best way to deliver content, but when starting a revolution we have to begin somewhere. So I decided to make a series of videos using only my iPad so I would have a much better idea of what was involved. I'll be adding all of my lessons learned to my iTunes U course. 

I'll call these videos Quickcasts, not because they're short, but because I want to make them quickly. The goal for a 5-10 min video will be no more than 20-30 min from set up to upload. This first one took a bit longer than that, but future ones will go much quicker. I learned a lot getting it together. Here's how I did it.

Equipment:

• iPad 2
• Notier Stylus
• Rode smartLav Microphone

Apps:

• Explain Everything $2.99
• Pinnacle Studio $12.99
• iMovie $4.99 (or free with new device)
• NodeBeat HD $2.99
• YouTube Capture Free

I used Explain Everything to capture all the video and screen writing. I used the Notier stylus for annotating and drawing. I've tried many styluses and this one works best for me. Over the years I've become more of an audio snob with my videos, so I have to have a microphone. I used the Rode smartLav. This was the first time I used it, so I still have a bit to learn about proper placement and such. My next video should sound better. On a side note, I've also played with the microphone built into my iPhone ear buds, I'm not sure how much better the Rode microphone is.

I also used Explain Everything to create the intro clip. It was too slow so I wanted to speed it up. Unfortunately iMovie on my iPad 2 could only slow down the video, not speed it up. I'm not sure if newer iPads can speed up video or not. So I took the clip into Pinnacle Studio to double the speed. I could have finished the video here, but I wanted to gain some experience with iMovie on my iPad, so I took the clip back to iMovie. All of our teachers already have iPads with iMovie.

The intro music was created in NodeBeat HD. This is a fun little app that I picked up a couple years ago while it was free. Moving audio around on an iPad can be problematic, but I was able to email the file to myself from NodeBeat and then import it to my project in iMovie. I could have used GarageBand to create the intro as well. Then I rendered the video to my camera roll and used YouTube Capture to upload. It is possible to upload directly from iMovie, but I also wanted the saved video file to drop into my iTunes U course anyway.

Next time I will position my microphone differently so the levels won't be too high. The intro clip with music is done so I'll just reuse it again. I may also spend a little more time prepping slides in Explain Everything so the video itself can be shorter. While nice at times, students don't need to watch me write every word on the screen in real time.