Taming the Distractible iPad

I've been thinking a lot lately about how to best advise and support our students as they try to minimize distractions on their iPads.  In the Dana Hall Middle School, we have firm rules about using the iPads for school business.  They know they are not allowed on Social Media sites during the course of the day, and they should not be messaging and emailing their friends (or parents) in class. We know that not all students are able to stick to these rules, but we are being vigilant, moving around the classroom, keeping students engaged to minimize down time that is a pitfall for distractions. Students caught not following the rules are dealt with, and overall things have been good.  Parents seem to be having more difficulty at home, however. Students get more personal email and text messages outside of school hours and are accustomed to being less monitored.  Parents are wondering if their daughters are really spending that much time doing work, or if they are spending most of their time socializing and drawing out the homework process. Clearly parents and students need additional guidance in how to move forward.

There are really two ways to approach distractions:

The first is to give students the tools to restrict distractions on their own, showing students how to turn off distracting Apps or limit the way they push messages at them while they are working.  This approach is best in the long run as students feel more ownership over their device and their learning. Much of this is done in the Settings area of the iPad. iMessage and several other Apps can be toggled on and off. The Notification Center in Settings allows you to change alerts, Badges and Banners for a variety of Apps so messages and email seem less urgent. There is also a Do Not Disturb setting that can be set manually or for different times of the day to help limit when FaceTime calls and alerts are allowed.

The second approach is more restrictive and would allow parents to lock down less desirable features of their child's iPad. In my opinion, this works best for younger ages or for students who have struggled to set their own limits. 

Under the Settings, General you will find two different options that can be used to lock down features. The first is found under Accessibility, Guided Access.  It allows someone to set a passcode to lock into a particular App. This passcode is independent of the passcode used on the lock screen, so parents can choose a code unknown to their child. Many Apps depend on others so using this feature is tricky.  The student may need to write a paper in Pages for example and then submit it via Google Drive or Schoology and Guided Access may prevent her from turning in her work. This might be helpful, however to encourage her to spend a certain amount of time writing for example before being allowed to move on to other things.

The other General setting to consider is the Restrictions area where parents can turn restrictions on and set a passcode unknown by the student. (Please make note of what you use here as it may require a complete reset back to factory settings to get out of if the Passcode is forgotten.) There are several things that can be disabled in this feature.  You will notice that iMessage, which seems to be the largest thorn for our parents this year, does not show up in this list.  A quick Google search brought me to this a great work around from the website: e- Quipped at:   http://nccparentsplace.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/taming-imessage-a-parents-guide/

Restricting iMessage:
If restrictions are enabled you need to turn off restrictions before you can perform this procedure.

1.     Go to settings – messages
2.     Set “iMessage” to “off”
3.     Go to settings – general – restrictions
4.     Enable restrictions
5.     Under restriction settings go to “allow changes” – “Accounts”
6.     Select “Don’t Allow Changes”
7.     iMessage is now disabled

For any parent looking to restrict your child's iPad in this way, please be clear with them what your restricting and why. It would also be helpful for your school tech support to know what is restricted. I've found myself going around and around with students this year trying to help them figure out why their iPad was "broken" when it had been restricted by their parents without them knowing.   

For us at Dana Hall, it is important that students not be restricted from downloading or updating Apps as we ften find ourselves suggesting an App update to help fix a known bug. (This happens more often than I would like) Students also need email for school purposes, but parents can certainly limit their daughters to only use their school email address on their iPad and adjust notification settings so banners are not popping up when she's working in something else.

I worry about a strict lock down approach, as students need to eventually manage their own time and their is nothing that makes an otherwise dull activity seem more exciting than an outright ban of it. I can see the need, however, and the families right to make these decisions was part of our overall decision to have families buy their own iPads and not have them provided by the school.  I am hopeful that together we will be able to find the right path for each student.

Workflow and the iPad

Well, September has come to a close and the school is starting to get into a rhythm with the use of the iPads in the classroom.  With so much new this year, it was hard to determine what our "standard" workflow was going to look like for the management of daily information or even if we should have a standard way of doing things. Things are starting to shake out and so we are starting to standardize a few things.

• Faculty post assignments and materials for their courses in Schoology.
• Students take notes in class using Notability.
• Student use Pages for any written assignments that will be turned in.
• Students turn written assignments into their teachers in one of two ways:
• Send it from Pages as a PDF file to the Schoology Dropbox, 
• Submit it to a shared Google Drive folder. 
  (Which of these two methods is used depends upon the teacher and what they feel works best for for organization and grading purposes.)
• Faculty are either grading in Notability on the iPad or are grading in Microsoft Word from their laptops.  This is based on the teacher and what works best for them. Some teachers prefer to type comments using Microsoft Word, some prefer to annotate notes by hand in Notability. In both cases, work is sent back to the student as a PDF using the same method the student used to turn it in. (Either Google Drive or Schoology)
• Other projects such as video files created with iMovie or Explain Everything are shared with the teacher using Google Drive. 

 

Notabiltity -

Notability is our core note taking App and it's what we are recommending all our students use when taking notes on their iPad.  While there are many other note taking Apps out there, Notability seemed to have a few things we considered essential. While the way Notability handles folders leaves a lot to be desired, it can be set to automatically sync to Google Drive. We felt this was important as a backup in case an iPad was lost or for some reason the student deleted the App mid-year they wouldn't loose all of their notes. Students can easily take notes by typing or hand writing, add photos from the camera roll or on the fly and edit them in the App.  The zoom feature works well and the Figure option is great for inserting problems in Math class. We also had teachers and students using Notability last year when we were using the iPad carts, so sticking with an App some community members were already familiar with seemed to make sense.  Why reinvent the wheel, right?

Students are still taking notes on paper in some classes.  Notability works well, but we understand it does not always work for everyone. It will also take time for some students to get familiar enough with taking notes on the iPad for them to be as efficient and effective as they are on paper.  It's a learning curve for all of us, so we're taking our time where we need to and encouraging the practice of digital note taking where it makes the most sense.

Schoology -

Schoology was adopted as the official LMS (Learning Management System) of Dana Hall last spring and we have paid for an Enterprise edition which allows our users to use the same login information that they use for everything else. In years past, Moodle had been used by many teachers but some found it clunky and hard to manage. Increasingly, faculty went off on their own, setting up other LMS solutions such as Edmodo or Schoology accounts. It was clear that choosing one would be best for the students and Schoology won out.  It had the functionality we wanted, we could roll our legacy Moodle classes into it without them having to be recreated and faculty had reported positive experiences from their customer support. So far things are going well with Schoology. We have experienced some bugs, but overall it's been reliable and their customer support continues to be good.

Pages - 

Students are using Pages on their iPads for their writing assignments that will be turned in to teachers. It has a lot of formatting options which many other word processing or note taking documents do not.  Students can double space, add headers and footers, adjust margins and do a lot of other formatting that isn't possible in many other Apps. 

For documents that do not require a lot of formatting, on first glance it would seem the power of Google Docs would indicate it to be a better choice than Pages, but a few crucial limitations prevent us from moving in this direction. Students using Pages are not reliant upon WiFi for it to work.  They can start a document in school and continue editing it later in the day even if they find themselves without an Internet connection, on the bus home from a sports game for example.  Google Drive allows you to set off line files but they are only viewable, not editable in this mode. The biggest stumbling block at this point is Spell Check.  There is currently (10-3-2013) no spell check for Google Documents on the iPad using the Drive App. This is a problem.  I am certainly hopeful an update will be coming soon, but until that day comes, Pages will continue to be our preferred method of creating formal written work.

Google Drive - 

Google Drive is a powerful tool and we will be using it a lot this year both in and out of the classroom.  It does require some organization on the part of the user and the more it is used the more important folder structures become. 

Google Drive with Notabiltity 

Thinking about the organizational piece before school started we thought we would like students to have as much as possible in one place. Students were asked to create subject folders in Notability for each class, then set Notability to sync to Google Drive into a Drive folder called Classwork 13-14" knowing it would autopopulate the Drive folder with all the necessary folders.  The result, we hoped, would be that students would have one folder for the year in Drive, with sub-folders for each course in which all Notability class notes would exist.   They could also use these same folders to upload other projects or any other work they wanted to store in Google Drive.  However, in practice, the backup from Notability to Google Drive gets really messy fast. Notes created in Notability are synced to Drive, but when something is moved in Notability from one folder to another that file is not moved in Drive, but a second copy is created in the new folder. Likewise deleted files and folders in Notability are not deleted in Google Drive.  That can be good if you need it to to rely on Google Drive as a backup, but not if your trying to keep Google Drive organized.  It's hard to make a change at this point with all students, but if we were to do it over again, we would still have students sync to Drive, but we would leave it as a default Notability folder in Drive and instruct the students to go there if they need to pull something from the backup, but otherwise set it and forget it.

It will be interesting to see if our thoughts about these Apps change over the course of the year.  So much depends on what updates are coming down the pike and it is hard to predict exactly how everything will work when it gets into the hands of Middle School students. It is certainly an interesting journey!