Revision using the iPads

Have to give credit to Mr Grieve who told me about an app that I might like to use in class.

 

The app in question was Gojimo.

 

This is a really good free app to engage students in revision activities in the classroom (and indeed outside of the classroom).

 

Put simply this is an app that poses multiple choice quiz questions to students, which doesn't sound too impressive. However the app organises questions into sub-sections that reflect units, and furthermore elements of units, for the course they are studying. The app also provides students with content when they have answered the question, either reaffirming what they got right, or explaining why they got the answer wrong.

 

I have used the app with YR11-YR13 students, with possibly the most pleasing response from YR11.

 

As students entered the room they were faced with the following questions:

Would you like 1,021 quiz questions that test your understanding of topics across both units?

How would this benefit you?

The answers were yes and they were good at explaining how this would help them to be successful in the summer.

I then connected an iPad to the projector and showed them the app and how to use it.

The rest of the lesson was very simple. Students had the rest of the time, about 50 minutes, to attempt as many quizzes as possible in groups of 3. They had to do the quizzes in a 10 question format (you can alter how many questions there are on each quiz) and they could pick whether to do random tests or specific topics. As an added incentive any group who got 100% on a quiz was awarded a green card (one group earned 3 green cards in the lesson).

Firstly I was impressed by how engaged the entire group was for the 50 minutes, not once did I catch a student on anything but Gojimo and secondly it was really good to hear the students talking about what topics they were feeling more confident about and which topics had now been highlighted as areas to re-visit.

Several of the group returned the following lesson to inform me of how they had been using Gojimo over the weekend for business and their other subjects, which is testament to how good the app is.

With my stronger YR12 and YR13 students (who were also engaged by the app) I added in an extra challenge, which was to get them to set a time limit of 10 seconds per question to force them to think quickly, again this time limit can be done in the app.

Next steps:

I hope to share this app with colleagues at the upcoming learning group, to see if it is as good for their subjects as it appears to be for Business.

 

 

The 2nd half term

Since my last blog I have been looking at ways to use the iPads and be able to access the work produced by students. I did want to use the iPads with all of my groups by now, but decided that it would be better to concentrate on just a small number of my classes. I have used the iPads with my YR13 and YR12 Economists as well as my YR12 Accountants, they are now in good habits, IPads are out and being used effectively nice a fast and they are returned quickly at the end of the lesson. It's a seems as bit obvious to say, but the more you use the iPads with groups the more efficient the students become and the distracting novelty factor soon wears off.

In my last blog I mentioned the use of Show me, this has been an app that I have continued to look at. I have also been using Evernote, Numbers and Keynote.

I will look at each of the apps below, briefly outline what I have tried and how I found the students reacted:

Show me - students liked this when I first started using the app, it's a really good app to get students to show they can draw diagrams/graphs etc AND verbalise them as they do it. This half term I have found a way in which the students work can be shared. Basically you can set up a group ( you need to set up a show me account for each student) in which students can share their show me's and you can share your show me's with them to. This is good to get an idea of what students understand and a way of modelling good work back to students. However not great for giving individual feedback.

Evernote - this is a great app, it's almost like an online scrap book where students can store almost anything (web pages, text notes, pictures, spreadsheets etc), the best thing about this app is that students just need to create an account with an email address and they can access their notebooks (scrap book) on almost any device, great for home learning/flipped learning. Another great feature of the app is that the students can share their notebook with you and you can send a message back to the student, good for feedback. My YR13 economists really liked this app,when doing a research task, I think with some more usage we can really investigate more of the features and build this into more lessons.

Numbers and keynote - these have been used in classes in a similar way to how excel and powerpoint would be used, as with most apple products then app is very intuitive and even if using for the 1st time students have picked up the basics quickly. My accountants liked numbers as a way of creating templates and doing their activities in the templates. My economists enjoyed producing and presenting using keynote instead of 'boring' powerpoint. An useful feature of these apps are that you can 'air drop' them across to the teacher iPad for assessment. However a weakness is that the work is stored on the actual iPad and could therefore be deleted by another user.

What are my next steps then?

Investigate more of the Evernote features, maybe even go 'bookless' with a group for a week - I believe that there may some way to get numbers and keynote work into Evernote, overcoming the issue of work being stored on the iPad.

Take the plunge with a large group - I have been able to work with small groups so far meaning an iPad each, or at max one between three, I now want to know how do you engage 30 students with 8 iPads?

One final observation..... I have personally found the use of my iPad to help with my efficiency, I have also found that it is not as frowned upon to sit on sofa sending emails/planning lessons compared to having to work elsewhere in the house.