Monthly Archives: November 2012

Home School Partnership- iPad Night

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One of our Link Learning cluster goals is to better inform parents/whānau about what we are doing in school.

Many parents/whānau have bought iPads because they have heard they are useful for children’s learning but are unsure of how to manage them and don’t know what apps to put on them.

I made this page on my iPad site

https://sites.google.com/site/initialipadsetup/community

with a view to sharing apps that people might like on their iPhone and or iPad. By having the web link they were also gaining access to the other pages of links I had assembled over the past year.

It was sort of like the hook to get parents along to a night time meeting- to show them what apps they might like as adults on their iPads. When people arrived at the meeting they were actually more interested in how to manage their iPads and what apps to put on them to help their children learn and to see some of the apps demonstrated to them before they bought them.

Some of the parents had already bought iPads but a couple were thinking of buying them for Christmas presents and were wondering whether their purchases were warranted.

I had asked schools to put a notice in their newsletters informing them that the meeting was going to be held in centrally situated restaurant/cafe. I had sussed the cafe out beforehand and knew that it had wifi and they agreed to open up at night time for us. We just took a painting off the wall and shone the data projector on to the wall.

The idea of a cafe was that it was neutral territory, not aligned with any school. And being in a cafe meant they could have a coffee and make it a bit of a social activity.

I gave the parents a handout with my contact details at the top and blank at the bottom and a pile of borrowed pens from #ulearn12 so they could make notes for later.

handout

I limited the evening to forty parents as I didn’t want to overload the venue. Here, one of the parents, Sarah, offered to share how she used guided access with her pre-schooler to limit his access to all of the apps at once. This was great- parents teaching parents in the same way as we encourage children teaching children.

It also meant that I was able to take a breath and take a photo!

It was a great night out and successfully worked towards achieving one of our cluster goals.

Above standard!

How are you informing your parent/whānau about what you are doing around eLearning?

IPad Evening

Pinterest Sharing and Curating

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I have been learning how Pinterest works lately and I like it.

It appeals to me for its ease of use, its reliability and its social nature.

You log in and set up some pin boards of things that you are interested in. Add a Pin It button to your bookmarks bar by dragging it, just like you do for your RSS or Diigo or Delicious or VLN bookmarlet.

Anything you like on the web with an image in it somewhere you just click on the ‘Pin It’ bookmarket, decide which image prompt you want to go with it and what board to put it on and you’re away.

If it’s a site without an image you can save and upload your own so it still works.

You can put a ‘Follow me on Pinterest’ widget on your blog as well like I have done here on my blog side bar so that people know that you are pinning on Pinterst and follow along.

Here is what my boards look like after a couple of weeks of pinning.

These are just my boards but you find some other people that are pinning and you can follow their stuff too so we all end up share and re-pinning their stuff onto your boards.

 

Give it a go. It’s fun and a useful way to store and find your stuff.

Oh and it’s a free iPad app too!!!

And Android.

e-Learning to support Mathematics and Bookmarking

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I had a request to support teachers as they participate in a Numeracy professional learning contract. Here are my quick resources around that area. I have purposely added links to my Delicious on line bookmarks so that the resource will continue to be useful as the links are continuously being updated and stay current.

I urge everyone to save their favourite places on the web to Delicious or Diigo. Storing your favourites in the cloud is way safer than storing them locally on your laptop.

For the bookmarks I do store locally on my laptop I use Xmarks which synches the same local bookmarks across all my laptops (TELA and Home) and all my browsers- Chrome, Safari, Firefox and potentially Internet Explorer. It’s a stunning tool to use as my bookmarks are then in the same place no matter what device I am using- TELA laptop or MacBook.

As an example of how useful cloud storage is I recently, mistakenly, deleted an entire folder of much used bookmarks from my laptop. Disaster averted as I re-synched back from XMarks.