Consumer Tip:
As I was trying to fill out some notes yesterday on an outline for a really good workshop I visited, I found myself getting frustrated with the monotonous “fill in the blank/paper-pencil” method. I was very engaged with the speaker and didn’t want to pause my attention to write something down. I am the type of learner that is distracted by that. Notes are necessary sometimes, so I feel like they should also be engaging. My rule of thumb for notes is this: don’t take notes and waste paper unless you REALLY ARE going to reference them later. (mine usually end up lost or in the trash...if we are honest, most of our notes end up lost or in the trash) So in my workshop I didn’t take notes for everything EXCEPT the session that I most wanted to remember . In this case, I needed notes that I KNEW wouldn’t get lost AND that I could easily find for reference at a later time. So a digital method made more sense to me. I used 2 things: my Notes app (that has some new GREAT features) and Skitch.
Skitch
Allow me to nutshell this (because it doesn’t require much elaboration). Download Skitch, allow it to access your camera and photos, take a picture of something, write or draw ON the actual photo. For my note-taking purposes yesterday, I took a picture of the handout with said outline, tapped my draw features, chose text from the pop-out, wrote text over the blanks in the picture of the outline….done! You can also draw arrows on pictures then email the picture to yourself to use in a document. Once you have these, they are saved to your photos (or dump them in Google Drive---download the app!) and you can pull them up by date (how most photos are organized on a smartphone) for reference later. Or, dump them in a pre-created Google Drive folder!
Notes
Notes has added a few features with iOS9. Add a picture to a note, and scribble on a note are the ones I like best. For note-taking, add a picture of a handout to a note, then add any notes or fill-in-the-blank values above or under the pictures. Then, add any scribble notes to that if you desire. Pretty straight-forward, and very handy.
School Tip:
BYOT is not for everyone, I know. I believe in its use, but also know it is not meant to be the end-all, be-all for instructional tools. BYOT is meant to be another tool that supports a specific instructional goal. I think some of us (and I say us for a reason) try to make certain tools (heck, certain people, situations, relationships...i can go on) reach our very high standard for what we want to do. Technology isn’t perfect enough for it to work like magic. All tools aren’t meant to answer all problems. So we have to look at any tool for what it is….a realistic, flawed device that helps one accomplish something specific. Insert BYOT here. Let me back up for a minute and give a scenario. You are introducing different types of rocks. You can only round up a few real-life examples. Have your students whip out their devices to google the different types of rocks so they can see those images. One step further, have them take pictures of certain types of rocks with their devices. You are lecturing through the cold war while students have questions to answer or an outline to fill in. Pull up todaysmeet.com, create a room, let students use devices to ask questions in the background in todaysmeet as you talk. You may just want them to use the browser to look up a definition or a concept. Let them ask Google what something means instead of you. Remember though: DO NOT SHOOT FOR THE STARS WITH STUDENT DEVICES! They are meant to be used as somewhat of a portal to the world, so use them for the web browser only, or for the camera only, and leave the building, creating and designing for the desktop computer. Don’t have such high expectations that your students AND BYOT fail you. Start simple and small and don’t overwhelm yourself.
No comments:
Post a Comment