iPad Case Studies

During the month of November, six staff at my school experimented with a set of ten iPad's borrowed from our board's technology lending library. Here are stories of two ways they were used.

Zooming Around

Grade 9 students spend a lot of time working with straight lines in math class. They draw lines that model real life scenarios, write equations to represent lines, and look at how pairs of lines intersect. Looking at the equations of two lines, students should be able to say if the lines intersect, of the lines are parallel so do not intersect, or if they are coincident. Graphing sets of equations of lines by hand can help students to connect algebraic and visual representations, but graphing this way has the physical limitation of drawing accuracy. One teacher used iPads with her grade 9 classes to overcome this limitation and investigate the intersection of lines that would be tricky to graph by hand.

The App	Safari Browser to use the Desmos online graphing calculator A home screen icon linking directly to http://www.desmos.com made the website easy to find and made it appear to opens like an app.
The Approach	Arrange students in groups of three. Give students pairs of lines to graph with Desmos. Students zoom in and zoom out to investigate how the lines overlap. Students record their observations on a template.
The Verdict	The teacher liked that zooming manipulation was tactile and directly with the graph, rather than clicking a button. This was good to give students a sense of large and small numbers through zooming. Students appeared engaged - groups were all huddled over the workspace with the iPad.

Explain it to me

One of our geography teachers continues look for are ways to encourage her students to learn in collaborative ways. With a built in microphone and a touch sensitive screen, an iPad is a good tool for students to explain ideas through words and gestures. By recording these explanations, they can be shared with classmates to help them understand concepts or with the teacher to demonstrate learning.

The App	EduCreations is a whiteboard which records sound, writing, typing, and movement. Recordings can be played back on the device or through a website at a later date.
The Approach	Arrange students in groups of three. Give students a discussion question from the textbook. Students discuss their answer to the question in their group and find supporting images online. Students record their explanation and upload the resulting video.
The Verdict	Some groups of three worked well, but in others one worked, one assisted, and one was distracted. More devices would be better. Overall quality of work did not improve, but student work was more accessible because students could look at the work from other groups online after class Lack of ability to edit recordings in EduCreations was disappointing. Because of this there was no way for the teacher or students to correct errors without redoing completely. Students were excited to use iPads, and asked to use them in later classes.