Ipads at school

So this year I have managed to get my hands on a shiney new ipad3 and I have decided to start doing my own trials at work.  I work at a school that uses tablets and one-to-one technology with our students and although I am a very big fan of this, it is cumbersome in PE and can limit what you can do out in the field.  I have decided to try and work through the year with some set goals in mind.   I am aiming to try and use Google docs so that I can do formative assessment and note taking during my lessons and then be able to easily get to it on my tablet at school or my Mac at home, this is good and I am hoping that my understanding of the various platforms will improve by using Google docs as my main method of record keeping.  This has already had some good added benefits as I can share my resources with my colleagues, and where I team teach this has been very valuable, saves sending attachments which is never great.

I am doing invasion games with my ipad in hand and trying to do formative assessment of students in this way – I think I need to be very early organised with spreadsheets and to know what I want to look for but by using the conditional formatting I am hoping to see how kids progress through skills or if they come with a set skill but don’t progress at all.

I am also keen to see if the new stylus system that we have put money towards will help me with keeping more records based on numerical data entry such as frequency of seeing a skill performed, as presently the google doc approach doesn’t really work, it is not easy to tap between docs and cells with the finger so I will see how that goes once the stylus and program arrive.

I am using other people’s blogs as a stepping stone to using effective apps in my class, but it is hard to know what to film when and when to make this fit into the landscape of the lesson.  With lots of peer feedback central to the way that I am now teaching, the cameras are an added bonus and are certainly useful, but when you can only film one thing at a time it can be hard to know what would be best to film.  I also enjoy tagging games but again it is choosing what to do with this data that makes things tricky.

Anyway I am enjoying the process so far and will keep updating as I go along.