Using Technology Better

 



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Transcript: Apple Shorts – Episode 1 – Notes

Good day and welcome to this episode of Apple shorts.  I’m Adrian from Using Technology Better and in under four minutes you’re going to learn some new tips or tricks that you can use straight away. That’s right, in less time that it takes to make two batches of two minute noodles, you will walk away with a new skill that you can use straight away. So let’s jump in and see what we’re going to learn. In this episode, we’re going to look at Notes and how that can work on your IOS device as well as on your desktop. We’re going to be looking at scanning and markup, searching, organising your notes and drag and dropping on an iPad.

To scan a document into notes. You will open up the note. Go to the plus button down the bottom, and it will pull a menu where you can scan documents. When you hit that, your camera will be activated and try to line up on the document that you’ve got when it’s in the right position, it will have a yellow box to highlight it. Take a photo of the image and what it does it scans it in and puts it straight into notes. Then you go to the “Share” button on the top right side and tap that, and what that does is to open up the menu which enables you to choose markup. So once you tap that scroll across in the bottom hit markup. Choose the pen that you want or the color that you want you can sign in the document. When you’ve done that, hit done and then go to the share button again and you can go create PDF.

This will now convert it to a PDF, and then the bottom you can share again and you can share it to email. So adding email address it will attach the document has been signed into the email address. Once it has sent, you then have the ability to either leave it inside to your notes or save to your files.

To search for things in Notes it’s relatively simple. Go to Notes and pull the window down and there’s a search bar at the top. Whatever you type in there will be searched for within all your Notes. So I just typed in the word dog, and it’s searching my handwriting as well. And you’ll notice this document I come down, there’s the word dog there that it searched. The handwriting does have to be relatively legible but it will search that as well, as well as every other word ‘dog’ mentioned inside Notes. So that is quite a handy way of searching for things. The other way can search is to go down to the bottom left-hand side where four squares are and this will search through all your attachments across all your Notes as well as your audio files, your documents you have inserted and websites. If you find a video of something that you like, if you just hold your finger on it, it will say open or showing Notes. If you open it will play directly from there. If you go show in Notes, it will take you to the Notes. Then you hit play, it will run normally as a video inside your Notes. So two ways of searching, easily finding anything that you’ve got in Notes. Very very handy. [Tweet “You can search handwriting, text and attachments, including audio and video in Apple Notes.”]

 



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Transcript: Education on Air: Seven essential elements of school transformation

All right. Hello everyone. Welcome to today’s session on transforming schools as part of the education series with Google. So really glad that you’re watching and looking forward to sharing some great ideas with you. So just a little bit about the structure for the session it’s quite a short session. And so we’re going to leave some time right at the end to have some questions. And so there is a question section that you can into your questions or your comments in there. And then I’ll have a look at those rights words again. Speaking of the end at the end of the session today also give you some resources at the end. So some links to some of Google’s resources that you can go back and have a look at in more in-depth. So make sure you stick around to the end for that as well.

By the way when we’re doing the live broadcast like these sometimes the quality can be a little bit varied for different people based on bandwidth and so on. There is a little cove down in the bottom right hand corner of your screen and you can always manually change the quality of the video feed coming in and you can take that up or down accordingly. So just be a little bit aware of that. So I’m just going to share my screen with you. We’re going to run through a little bit of some information about the seven elements of School Transformation and want to be out to give you a bit of a live demonstration of the Google Transformation Center as well.

So let me just do this right now and we’ll just show screen and excellent.

So a couple of ways that we can stay connected as we go through this series and then afterwards as well. So my name is Mike Reading the lead director at Using Technology Better and I’ve been teaching in Australia for a number of years now living in New Zealand and working through the company Using Technology Better we really serve schools mainly in Australia, Zealand but also a little bit around the world. You can always tweet me @mikereading. Then we have our Website usingtechnologybetter.com where we share about ideas, resources and so on. So let me just give you a little bit of background a bit of a context to today’s session. I was part of the teaching in a high school in New South Wales and he used to be a high school science teacher and then through an interesting set of circumstances started teaching history and geography for a number of years and was teaching history and geography in a high school setting.

The government brought out the what was called the Digital Education Revolution which most Australian teachers would know about. We were and I , senior college so we didn’t have a staged rollout of technology what we had was all of the students got a device at one time so we went one to one basically overnight and to be honest it was a bit of a disaster. We didn’t have the preparation for it.

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All right afternoon everyone welcome to this breakout session on leveling up with Google certifications. So you just want to say thanks for watching. And hopefully we can give you some great information during this breakout session.

A couple of things just to take note of as we get started. There is a question and answer page that you can ask any of your questions in and I will answer those at the end. So feel free to ask a question any time and we’ll get to those towards the end. If I get to answer it live on the call I will answer it via a message on the same page.

When we’re doing anything live online, sometimes the quality can be a little bit varied based on where you are and your bandwidth and so on. So there is a cog right down in the bottom right hand corner. And if you click on that you can change the quality of the broadcast so you can take that up or down accordingly. So feel free to use that if you need to.

Right at the end of the session I’m going to give you some resources including a link to receive some vouchers for the certification exams at a discounted price. So make sure you stick around and to be out to pick up those vouchers available right throughout December. So I know it’s a crazy time of year right now but you might find a bit of time at the end of the year just to sit down and have a look at the education center and then have a go at one of the exams.

Now in session today, what I’m going to do is just take you through a bit of a certification pathway and show you some of the resources how it works just to give you a bit of context in orientation and that we should point you in the right direction so that you can get started or continue on your journey.

I’m just going to share my screen right now and then we’ll continue the conversation. So without certification pathway there is a number of courses or levels that you’re able to take in so we start off with Google Level 1. Then we can progress on to level 2, then we can progress to the certified Trainer. And then lastly we have the certified innovator.

When you work your way through these lessons, basically you can get one of the badges that you can see on the bottom here. And you can use that on your resume in your email signature, different places where people like to put those.

So I encourage you to think about that in terms of, not so much a micro credentialing course, where it’s really short and sharp . There is a fair few lessons involved in each of these levels but you can progress at your own pace which is which is fantastic.

All right. So you might be interested to know that there have been over 40,000 teachers have been through the certification process and that means that they’ve gone through the training centre at least at some level,

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Transcript: Having a growth mindset as a teacher

You know there’s a lot of talk in education at the moment about growth mindset, and about perseverance, and having grit, and you’ll hear terms like you know you’re in the learning pit. We want to teach our students to be able to think, and creatively solve problems, and to take risks. And we need to do that.

But here is a trend that I’ve noticed in myself and also in teachers when I do teacher training. I work with a business coach, and whenever I’m looking at the next part or the next phase of my business growth, or looking at you know one of my options. I come up against all this resistance and I guess inadequacies and fears. And when I talk to the business coach about that, he remarks to me and he says that out of all the different businesses that he works with if anyone has come from a teaching background, or an educational related background they are the worst people to work with in terms of business growth because we are so risk adverse. And there is something about the education system that builds that mentality that thinking into us.

It’s more about following a standard operating procedure, it’s working methodically to an answer. It’s following instructions. And so on, and so we get conditioned or I guess taught to think in a certain way. And I’ve noticed this in my teacher training as well. When I get to a spot in the presentation where I ask for some feedback from the teachers I noticed some interesting psychology. If I just ask the audience to shout out some answers to me. Generally speaking the room goes very quiet. No one really wants to answer because who wants to put up their hand and be wrong in the answer that you provide. But if I let the participants speak amongst themselves in a small group and come up with a consensus as a table or as a group, and then I ask for feedback, the feedback is forthcoming.

The reason is that we’ve got this confidence that other people think like us or other people have the same thoughts as us. And so therefore we feel more confident to be able to share our ideas, whether they’re right or whether they’re wrong. I think that’s something that we need to be aware of because we don’t do the same sort of thing in a business group. Generally speaking business people will put up their hand straight away or someone will answer straight away. It’s just a different thinking and a different psychology around this.

So my challenge to teachers is, we should be telling our students, and teaching students about grit and perseverance and and so on. But we need to start taking this in ourselves.

Here is a question to challenge yourself with: “When was the last time you did something for the first time?” As a teacher, sometimes we don’t like to change the method because it’s working. Or we don’t like to try new things in case it fails and maybe you are dealing with a tough class, and if you let the class go just a little bit. It’s kind of like you give an inch and they take a mile.

So we kind of stop taking risks in teaching. Sometimes we don’t want to try new technology because we’re not sure if it will work or not, but we’ve really got to start to display these qualities in our own teaching if we expect students to pick up o...

Highlights

0:00:00 – Where are we recording this podcast?

0:01:50 – The 1 question we get asked more than any other?

0:02:30 – What is exciting us at the moment in the technology space

0:03:35 – what is Apple classroom able to do / what problems can it solve?

0:05:35 – How technical is it to setup Apple Classroom?

0:07:00 – Mark makes an interesting comparison of Apple classroom

0:08:35 – The downside of Apple classroom and iBooks

0:09:30 – Does Apple classroom have any advantages over Google classroom? And what features are missing

0:11:10 Lets talk about workflow – If you have Google and and Apple products – would you use Google docs or Pages?

0:12:00 In an ideal world what tools would you use?

0:14:40 – Mike questions the notion that iOS is intuitive?

0:16:10 Microsoft teams

0:18:25 – we go tool for tool Word v’s Google Docs V’s Pages

0:20:35 – Marks explains the potential of iTunesU

0:21:35 – The design history & roadmap for Apple, Google & Microsoft

0:23:30 – the conundrum of being forced to choose 1 tool – so why do schools and businesses do this?

0:26:10 What about industry standards – Can’t students just pick up any tool?

0:28:18 What is better Keynote, Google Slides and PowerPoint – why?

0:29:50 – What is better for note-taking? Google Keep, Apple Notes and Microsoft sticky notes

0:32:30 – What is better? OneNote Class Notebook, iTunesU, Apple Classroom

035:02 – What device is best, a Chromebook, an iPad, PC

0:37:10 – How do you measure a return on investment for your IT spend? Does more spending = better learning?

0:40:30 – What tool is better for thinking?

0:42:10 – Should students learn to sketchnote?

0:43:00 Patti Dobrowolski on creativity and problem solving

0:45:20 – The power of handwriting

0:46:00 – Do you know of a school that is using iPad Pro’s – we’d love to speak with you

0:45:53 – What do you need to consider if you want to future proof your technology spend?

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Transcript: Mike Mark and Adrian discuss what tool and device is best in education

Mike: We’re just driving through the Texas countryside, on our way to Houston, and in the car, we’ve got myself, Mike, we’ve got Mark and Adrian in the backseat.

He sounds a long way away.

Adrian: I’m a long way away!

Mike: So, we’re driving through the country side, we’re wondering a whole range of things and we thought we might just record some of our conversation as we drive along.

First thing we’re wondering is how is it that when we’re driving on a freeway and the speed limit is 75mph and we’re driving along at about 90mph and we’re being passed by cars. It looks like we’re standing still.

So, if anyone in America wants to leave comments or share notes or email us at [email protected] and let us know why that is. We’d love to know. It’s just one of those cultural things that we are aware of…

Mark: We tried Googling it but it didn’t come up ...

Highlights

0:00:30  A discussion about innovation and was there innovative at ISTE?

0:01:50  What is innovation?

0:03:50  Who is driving innovation?

0:05:13  What Adrian took away from the conference.

0:06:30  The increase in tactile technology

0:07:45  What Mike took away from the conference

0:08:30  Where’s the data?

0:09:20  How do we see whole school transformation and help the teachers who aren’t attending conferences like ISTE?

0:13:10  What stem tools we saw that will help the slow adopters

0:17:10  Are we trying to turn students into gamers or gamers into students?

0:18:45  Tips for those attending ISTE for the first time

0:23:26  Why you should speak to the product managers

0:25:00  The most important thing you can do after a conference

Transcript: ISTE Recap

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Mike: All right so you’ve got Mike, Mark and you’ve got Adrian and we’re just sitting around our kitchen table in Austin, Texas. We’ve just finished the ISTE Conference in San Antonio 2017 and we thought we’d just do a bit of a debrief. We were just talking about our experience, some of the things we learnt, some of the things we’ve walked away wondering, and thought it might be good to record our conversation. So Mark you had some interesting things to say about innovation after the conference.

Mark: Yeah well we we’re actually talking with Alice Keeler at the dinner and one of the questions came up, what are you looking to get out of this conference? I’ve been to a few conferences but not one as big as ISTE. So I was really hoping that I’d find something quite innovative because my question was, what is out there that’s actually innovative these days?

You know I think there’s a lot of people doing things but then what are you actually doing that’s new and interesting and something that people haven’t heard of before. So to be honest I actually don’t know if I’ve found it. What do you guys think? Did you find something truly innovative?

Adrian: No, I didn’t find anything truly…like just jumping out that I thought I’ve never seen that before. I saw variations of nearly everything I’d seen and people are done with it, but then for me, it was looking at how you do the pedagogy the stuff that you do in the classroom what that looks like when you link your subjects together and then what you can use to enhance that.  Rather than trying to be innovative and flashy-dashy.  Because I think there’s always going to be something shiny on the lot, not necessarily add to what you’re learning is.

Mike: Well I think in that conversation we had a dinner the conversation did turn to what is innovation and I think it might be helpful to just backtrack a bit because like you’re saying Adrian flashy-dashy is innovation but maybe that’s not what innovation means to some people. So how would you define the innovation Mark?

Mark: I think whenever you’re in a classroom you’re always reflecting right. So you’re always trying to get more out of what you’re doing with the students. You’re trying to engage that student that maybe...

This short video demonstrates Google Forms’ new quizzes feature. You will learn how to turn a Google Form into a quiz, input the correct answers, create custom feedback and see your student’s results.

 

 

Video Highlights:

00:08 Overview

00:30 Adding questions

01:11 Enabling and configuring quizzing feature

03:25 Collecting email addresses

04:03 Answer key

05:44 Doing the quiz demo

06:44 Basic statistics

07:02 Manual review

08:30 How to configure options

09:33 Closing remarks

Transcript: How to Use Google Forms’ New Quizzes Feature

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Hi there, I’m Sam from Using Technology Better, and today I’m going to give you a demonstration of Google Forms’ Quizzes feature. So this is a relatively new feature that Google has added to Google Forms. What it lets you do is automatically grade multiple choice check-box and drop-down questions, lets you return the results to the students straightaway on the screen so they can their score, or at a later date if you like via email. Part of this you can also include feedback on correct and incorrect answers. It also lets you see some basic statistics about your students’ performance. So let’s get started.

On my screen in front of me you’ll see that I already have a Google Form that I’ve built earlier. So that’s really the best place to start, by jumping into it with an existing form, or you can create a new one, and pop your questions in. So as I mentioned, you do need to make sure you stick to either multiple choice check-box or drop-down style questions. I like to include a “Your Name” question just for easy looking at the results to see which students have filled it in, but obviously you don’t have to if you don’t want to.  I’ll talk a little bit more shortly about collecting the students’ email address as an identification as well.

But now that we’ve added our questions, we can go in and actually enable the quizzing feature. So to do that, come up to the top right of the screen here to your cog icon which is Settings. And you’ll see that on the third tab, it says Quizzes. So we can jump in here and simply toggle on “Make this a quiz.” So further down, we’ve got a few options we can configure. So the first one is how you want to release the students’ mark. So “Immediately after each submission” means that they’ll see a little link on the screen that says “View my score,” and I’ll actually show you that shortly, and it will pop up their grades straightaway and any feedback that you’ve configured in there. Now if you prefer, you can actually not show them their score straightaway and put on this option for “Later after manual review.” Actually gives you the power to view all of the results and return the students’ grades in one batch. So for instance, you might want to use this latter option if it is quite a formal test and they are sitting at different times and you don’t want students to get feedback at different times.

So if it’s perhaps just a formative assessment quiz that they’re doing at home or during class and it doesn&...

In this video clip, Alice and I discuss how we can help resistant teachers change their mind about technology.

This video was part of an hour long Google hangout.  You can watch the whole hangout here

Transcript: How To Help Resistant Teachers Adopt Technology

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Alice: When you’re working with teachers and they’re tech resistant, what are some strategies that you use to help them acclimate?

Mike: So here’s my thing, it’s all about value. So we’re coming up to the New Years and most people have to make a New Year’s Resolution. They’re going to say that this year is the year that I get up at 4 o’clock like you, and I work and I get stuff done before the kids get up, or I’m going to save money, this is the year that I’m going to save, and then two or three days later and the sales are on and they use their credit card.

It’s frozen and they have their thing of ice and they get their hair dryer out and they getting their credit card ready.  What’s happened is that they’ve changed their mind about it; they really do believe that this year’s going to be the year that it changes, the mental attitude to it, they believe it and they set themselves up.

So they’ve changed their mind, but what they haven’t changed is their values. So when we’re under pressure what happens is we always revert to our values. If you’re ever going to engage someone who’s tech resistant, what you have to do is that you have to change their value and their mindset around that.

We can’t, go to them with a whole lot of information and try and show them different things, because what you can do is that you can win the argument but you’ll lose the war. So what I do is always find out what do they value? It could be saving time, it could be confusion around versions in Microsoft Word, any of those things and if you can solve their problem and show you the value of it, then you start to get some gains. I don’t know, what are your ideas?

Alice: It’s tough the best thing is to show them a win, show them the thing that really saves them time or just makes them really exciting. I’ll share a story with you, a friend of mine, he actually works for Google and he goes to this school where this teacher was ready to retire and she’s like, “I can’t do this technology.  I’m about ready to pack up, anyways it’s time for me to go.”  He rolled out Google classroom, and she said, “This allows me to engage with kids, in a way I haven’t been able to before”. She not only didn’t want to retire she’s literally out doing Google classroom workshops teaching other teachers.  Sometimes it just takes figuring out what is that one thing, like Flubaroo, or collaborating on Google Slides, one thing that is really like, “Wait I can do that?!” It feels approachable, but I think it’s like you said, one thing, not twenty.

What’s the one thing that’s going to transform your class, and it’s the thing that you’re willing to invest time in.

One question I get asked all the time is how do I teach with technology when I have limited resources.  Maybe you have 5 devices for 25 students.

In this video, Alice Keeler and I discuss strategies for enabling collaboration and ICT integration into lessons when resources are limited.

 

Transcript: How to Work with Limited Devices in a Classroom

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Mike:  And we’ll get started. I’m going to ask one of the questions that came in by the Google form that we sent to everyone who registered, and this question I come up with a lot, you’ve got classes that you want to transition to technology in the room, but they don’t necessarily have the resources, and maybe they’re not down the path of a BYOD program as such.

And so we’ve got here Kaitlin from Australia’s asking, this year I’ve implemented Google Sites to open up communication between home and learning, which I think is a great thing, but they want to develop it next year but we got five laptops for 27 students. I’m just wondering if you have you seen any creative ways where the teachers are managing small numbers of computers with a decent size class?

Alice:  Absolutely, I cannot plug Catlin Tucker enough I think she is amazing and inspiring and she’s got a great book on blended learning. If you go look at her classroom she has zero devices, actually that’s not true, recently she got one computer from a recycling center. And she’s an expert on blended learning and actually just came out with a second book on, Creatively Teaching the Common Core, and so the number of devices doesn’t matter.

Now of course she’s teaching high school, and so one of the things that she really captures is the BYOD, the students to bring it in the room, but sometime I heard her say is that she almost prefers one cell phone and four students, because it really forces collaboration. Something that I’m really into is that we remove this term, “the front of the room”.

It’s not the stage on the stage, so how do we get students being actively engaged in their own learning, and helping to drive their learning? So part of that is doing small groups and rotations, which I think is something that Catlin Tucker has been talking about recently also, which you can see from website catlintucker.com, but the idea is that your students can work in really small groups, and then you can really maximize your technology.

You can see that students are doing different things at different times. So you can have a group who’s working on their blog, you can have a group that’s doing Makers Space, you know not everything has to be plugged in, having them use glitter and scissors is not to be taken out of the curriculum, and then you’re working with kids because you cannot talk a kid into being a critical thinker.

You have to let them think and give them high quality feedback, so that’s something that I really encourage. So I think just having five computers is really doable when you move into a system where you’re not expecting all students to be doing the same thing at the same time.

Mike:  Yeah that’s right I think it does get a little bit hard for a teacher to get their head around, because they have to have all these different ...

In this video clip, we talked about what useful scripts you can use with Google Classroom and  Google Docs.  

This video was part of an hour long Google hangout.  You can watch the whole hangout here

Transcript: Google Classroom Scripts You Can Use

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Mike: So let me ask you a couple of questions about Google Classroom and then you can run it through. Obviously it is, I would say a lot of schools, Australia, New Zealand, ask a complete tool for into Dashboard or by Hapara, a lot of schools in New Zealand use Hapara because it was out before Classroom was even thought of, and because it was born in New Zealand there’s a lot of, not allegiance, but what’s the word I’m looking for, there’s a soft spot to it.

 

So we’re going to talk about the differences between the two as we go, but one of the questions that we’ve got here in terms of using Google Classroom is a bit of a high-end question to kick off with, but can research projects for Middle School be streamlined to Google Classroom, if so what script would be useful? It’s from the USA, and I don’t know what he means by streamline, but you might want to talk about some of the scripts that you’ve written.

 

Alice: Let me first just say when you talk about Hapara with Google Classroom, there’s very little conflict. You talking about a Venn-diagram they actually overlap with just this one part. Hapara does so many other things that Google Classroom doesn’t do, so whether or not you want to do that one feature, Classroom gives a nice interface.

 

For scripts wise, first of all there are no add-ons for Google Classroom, so anything that you’re doing when they talk about scripts is really scripts for Google Spreadsheets and Google Docs, you actually can’t use scripts for Google Slides, but you can for forms. One of the things I need to extract all of group work being out of the classroom folder class, so then it lists every single document that any student has turned in on any assignment, so that’s alicekeelr.com/listdocs if you go to alicekeeler.com/googleclassroom I’ve got a 100 blog posts just on Google Classroom.

 

Some of them are talking about how to use something like list docs, so you can keep that efficiency under. In terms of research project, I don’t know how I would specifically do the script for research projects, obviously it’s going to depend on what you’re outcomes are and different things like that, but I do have one alicekeeler.com/groupdocs , this allows you as you get your roster of all your students in your email address, and then you create some sort of template of the project that your students seem to be working on.

 

So it might be an MLA formatted paper, or a Google Slide that they’ll each contribute their own piece to, whatever your template is, and it will prompt you for the document ID, and you will create a copy of that document for each group. So the problem is that Google Classroom is not currently set up to do group work, when you make a document you can’t make it for the whole group, you have to make it one per student, which then I end up opening a lot of blank documents.