Battery Life: The iPad's Killer Feature

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One thing that didn't happen during my iPad trial? Tripping over charging cables. The battery life of the iPad, including the iPad mini that's become my primary device, is taken for granted a bit. But in a school, knowing that your device will last all day, no matter how you are using it, is transformative. I'm currently at 10 hours of use, and still have 32% battery remaining. All hardware requires trade-offs (like the non-Retina display I'm using right now), but I for one am glad Apple has prioritized battery life. Less than 10 hours would be a huge disappointment now.

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iTunes U and Edmodo

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The Info tab for my AP Latin course. Lofty goals.

For this school year, I have been using Edmodo as the LMS for all of my classes. It’s worked better than I had anticipated, and certainly better than our school’s current system. For the period my AP students were a part of the iPad trial, I wanted to test out using iTunes U, so I created a course just to use during those five weeks.

There are enough great walkthroughs of iTunes U out there that I won’t go into much detail, but there are a lot of things that I, and my students, liked about it.

Positive:

  • The teacher interface for managing the course was easy to learn and pleasant to use.
  • The ability to easily add content was very helpful, particularly when adding content from the iTunes Store. I added (free) apps, iBooks, and podcasts to the course, and the students had no problems finding them. In general, the students seemed to have less trouble accessing any of the posted resources than with Edmodo.
  • Most students took notes in their preferred note-taking app, but the ability to take notes on books, podcasts, and lectures and have them all in one place was very slick.
  • So long as the students had Notifications enabled, I could be reasonably certain that if I posted something, they would see it.
  • Several students commented that they simply liked using iTunes U better, because it was so well-designed. That "delight" factor is tough to quantify, but not unimportant.

Less-Positives:

  • As a teacher, I could only update the course from my computer. Not a huge problem, but as I am using my iPad more and more, this was annoying.
  • Communicating with the students was easy, but that communication was only one-way. There was no way for students to turn in materials or communicate with me or the class (other than email, of course).

So, when all of my students have iPads, would I prefer iTunes U or Edmodo? I’m still not sure. I have a lot of issues with Edmodo. For one, I’m wary of any free service whose business model is unclear to me. What happens if/when Edmodo is purchased by some textbook company? I’m also not a fan of their iOS apps, which are buggy at best and non-functional at worst. Still, Edmodo does a lot of things well. Namely, it is easy for students to interact with me and their classmates. That has been even more useful this year than I would have anticipated. In addition, Edmodo’s ability to do some basic polls, quizzes, and to collect assignments can really make it a one-stop shop for most teachers. With iTunes U, I would continue to use other sites (like Quia) for online quizzes and Dropbox or Evernote for assignments. That being said, for an iPad-centric environment iTunes U is a powerful, well-designed app whose design alone makes it a great option. Fortunately I don’t have to decide today.

Using iTunes U for five weeks did really highlight one of its strengths: the ability to create a self-paced course. While my course was created as “In-Session” so that I could attach due dates to assignments, it was obvious that iTunes U would really shine in creating a self-paced learning environment. While at first that doesn’t seem to apply to a high school classroom, I began to think about how it really could help create a more student-focused environment. What if my Latin 4 class had different units, that they completed at their own pace? There could be a “War Unit” with excerpts from Caesar, Nepos, and Vergil. There could be a “Love” unit with Catullus, Ovid, and Vergil. Students would work in class, but at their own pace, on whichever unit seemed most interesting at that time. I would love to create a course like this (cf), and iTunes U would make it very doable for the teacher. Summer enrichment courses or AP review would also be great candidates for a self-directed iTunes U course.

For now though, both Edmodo and iTunes U are pretty good options for teachers. Now if our grade book and SMS software would finally enter the 21st century, I’d be in good shape.

AP delenda est?

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A recent NY Times article reported that Dartmouth is no longer accepting credit for high scores on AP tests. According to Dartmouth, 90% of students who scored a 5 on the AP Psychology test couldn't pass the exam for Dartmouth's intro psych class. Now this is only my first year teaching an AP course, so I don't speak with a lot of experience here, but this only serves to feed this question that's been gnawing at me: Can a content-based AP course truly coexist with an innovative 1:1 iPad deployment?

During the five weeks that all of my students had iPads, we were reading the tail-end of the Julius Caesar portion of the AP Latin syllabus. After a semester of traipsing through Gaul with C. Iulius, my students, while good soldiers, grew noticeably weary of the material. The brief foray into the cultures of the Druids and their "wicker man" helped, but there's only so much one can do to make Caesar's genocide palatable for teenage girls. Since they all had the iPads, I tried to think of ways they could save us.

Unfortunately, I kept running into two problems. I will be the first to admit that these are probably just illustrations of my own limitations, as somebody still new to both AP Latin and teaching with iPads. Still, no easy solution presented itself.

The first problem I had was with time. Some of the ideas I had for ways to engage with the material would have necessarily meant slowing down the pace at which we moved through the curriculum. The AP syllabus is not a small chunk of reading, and while I am happy to slow down and look at a few sections in-depth, there's a limit to how much of that can be done while still getting through at least most of the syllabus–which is the expectation.

The larger issue I found myself running up against was the curriculum itself. My students had in their hands devices containing virtually every word ever written in Latin that has survived. Yet, they are stuck reading only the lines that the College Board has declared to be worthwhile. You love Ovid? Sorry, no time. You want to be a lawyer, so Cicero sounds interesting? No can do. The rigidity of an AP curriculum is not new, but it is highlighted when the students have these Internet-connected devices.

I realize I am teaching a dead language, but I like to convince myself that I can still teach important skills like problem-solving, critical thinking, etc. Based on what I've read and my limited experience, teaching those skills is vastly more palatable when the subject matter is something the students are passionate about. How great would it be to let the students choose which Latin authors they want to read and then teach some text to their classmates? The new technologies make that very possible, but what happens when curriculum stands in the way?

To paraphrase Fraser Speirs again, technology, pedagogy, and curriculum all have to adapt to really get lasting change. At my school, the technology is coming, I can learn the pedagogy, but what do I do when I don't control the curriculum? AP courses aren't going away any time soon, so is it possible to really change anything in that context?

State of Perpetual Sunday

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You know that feeling that sets in every Sunday evening? That anxiety/sadness that settles like a lump of poorly-digested Chipotle in your stomach at the knowledge that your weekend is over?

Well as a teacher, I get nine weeks of vacation. So now that my final week of “freedom” has arrived, I have that same Sunday Night feeling, except it will last all week and is magnified by a factor of nine. Happens every year around this time.

It’s not that I dread going back, exactly. I like my job–most of the time. It’s more an anxiety borne from not having completed the myriad things I had hoped to achieve this summer, both for business and pleasure. Books unread, planning unfinished, video games unbeaten.

Once August hits and the meetings resume and the students return, the feeling fades away. I will resolve that next summer will be more productive and more relaxing at the same time. So it goes.

Backward Design

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On episode 76 of Back to Work, Merlin talked a bit about the idea of backward design. Of course, he wasn’t talking about education, but it was the same principles that all teachers learn in their first education class. I was thinking about this today when I saw The Dark Knight Rises. I haven’t read all of the reviews I’ve saved in my Instapaper queue, but the consensus seems to be that it’s a good film, though not as strong as the first two in the trilogy, and a fitting end to the series.

I’m not sure precisely how this film stacks up against the others, but viewed as a trilogy it’s hard not to be awed by Christopher Nolan’s achievement. Watching them all, it seems clear that Nolan had a clear idea of where he wanted the story to go from the very beginning, his own version of “backward design.” It is of course entirely possible that I’m wrong, but I think it’s difficult to fake this level of completeness in a story. Breaking Bad is another prime example of this. While the details of the story have evolved over the seasons, the basic premise of Walter White turning from Mr. Chips to Scarface has driven the show successfully. I haven’t read enough interviews with Christopher Nolan to know the arc he had in mind for his Dark Knight triogy, but I can give it no higher praise than to say it compares favorably with Breaking Bad.

It’s that time of summer where I am beginning to think about my classes for the upcoming year. I’m no Vince Gilligan or Christopher Nolan, but I’d really like to be able to have just as strong a vision for what I want to happen from August to May. What is my ultimate goal for this course? In the AP course in particular, which I am teaching for the first time, that’s not an easy question to answer. Possibilities include:

  • High participation rate on the AP Latin test in May
  • High average scores on the AP Latin test in May
  • For the students to have an appreciation of the literature of Classical Rome
  • For the students to be experts on Latin grammar and syntax
  • For the students to be able to translate Classical Latin fluently

Of course, I do not have to choose just one of those goals, but the order in which I prioritize them will have an impact on the day-to-day planning of the class. Since this is my first time with this particular course, I’m not really hoping for Gilligan or Nolan level of execution (sorry, students), but at least the first season of Heroes would be nice.

Surreal

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Pure Loyalty, a service in NYC for high school students who are not allowed to have their electronic devices in school. They park a truck outside the school, lock up the phones and iPods, and then return them at the end of the day.


Is there a better example of the problem with the way schools look at technology? Now BYOD doesn't really work, and a kid texting from a "dumb phone" is probably better off leaving the phone at home.


But isn't there something vaguely Brazil about schools telling students: "You have very powerful, pocket-sized computers. DO NOT bring them to school!"


If you had told me in 1997 about the capabilities of an iPod Touch, I would have been amazed. If you then told me that I would have to pay money to keep from bringing it into school, I would've been confused.


(Via Kottke)

Steve Jobs: "Technology Cannot Fix Education"

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Steve Jobs, in 1996:



"I used to think that technology could help education. I've probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I've had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent."



Digital textbooks are shiny and new, but not a panacea.

Textbooks are dead. Long live textbooks.

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Predictably, the non-education tech press is focusing on iBooks 2.0 and iBooks Author. I still think that iTunes U is the bigger deal for education in the long-term, but somebody outside of the classroom may not recognize that. Interactive textbooks, while certainly an improvement, are still mostly presuming the same model of education that's persisted for 100 years. The importance of iBooks Author is that teachers now have the same tools (for free) that the textbook publishers have. It will be interesting to see what tech-savvy teachers do with that. I would imagine we will soon see content that is a "textbook" in name only.

Apple's Education Announcement

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Apple's NYC event just ended, and it covered essentially what was predicted. To wit:


Textbooks


Interactive textbooks are cool, but not new. Inkling has had a great app for a while now, but lacked publisher support. If the major textbook publishers are really behind Apple's initiative, that's huge. It could definitely help tilt schools currently on the fence about a 1:1 iPad deployment. The pricing of those textbooks ($14.99) is also pretty significant. For a private school like mine, asking students to buy an iPad and some $14.99 textbooks would end up saving parents a lot of money. The iBook authoring tool looks great too, and anything that makes it easier for teachers to create custom lessons is a positive.


iTunes U


As Fraser Spiers has said repeatedly, you need technology, pedagogy, and curriculum. Longterm, iTunes U could be a huge step toward integrating those three. The interactive textbooks don't mean much by themselves, but combined with the iTunes U app, teachers can really move to a curriculum and pedagogy that are entirely new. Even at the high school level, it is now possible to easily offer a course that is entirely digital, without expensive expensive hardware or software. All that's needed is a student with an iPad (and a teacher with a Mac to create the content).


What now?


There is often a very conflicted response to these types of announcements. The tech bloggers have never been a teacher, and are quick to praise any new technology as "saving" the broken education system. As evidenced by the lack of change over the last 100 years, that is rarely how it works out.


Among education technology people, most either rush to proclaim, "All our problems have been fixed!" or list the reasons why nothing will change. Of course the reality is probably somewhere in the middle. Any teacher who has been waiting for Apple to "save" or "fix" education is part of the problem. The tools are there, and have been for a while. Today's announcements just made those tools even better.


The challenge for me? I can think of 100 ways I could use these new tools. But my administration has 101 reasons why it won't work. Guess who will win?