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!