Classroom 2.0

Pages - While there are less expensive alternatives for word procession on an iPad, Pages is the most stable option that will consistently be supported and updated for the life of the iPads.

Diigo Web Highlighter for Safari - As one of our goals was to take advantage of the web connectivity and social bookmarking, Diigo was a perfect solution.  Once the Diigo app is installed, there is a three step process to install the Safari web highlighter.

To access and refer to each other’s research, students had to access Diigo through Safari, not the Diigo app.  The purpose of the collective research group was to have students examine each other’s research and use the resources their classmates found in their final research paper.

Notability - Because students would still be conducting traditional paper based research, we needed a solution that would allow them to digitize and share their research.  When students found traditional paper content that was part of their research, they could snap a picture of the document and pull it into Notability.  They could then digitally highlight, underline and insert notes on the document.  Notability will also export directly to Dropbox from within the app.

Explain Everything - This step was a late addition to the process and allowed students to create video screencasting feedback of each other’s papers.

Students exported a PDF version of their paper from Pages and email it to a classmates SendtoDropbox email address.  This would place the PDF version of the paper into the classmates Dropbox account.  The receiving student could then open ExplainEverything, link to their Dropbox account and use the PDF of their classmates paper as the back drop to the screencast.  To share the video files, we had students publish directly to the teacher’s YouTube channel from ExplainEverything. 

the recent update to the Google Drive app that allows for in-app creation, editing and sharing of a Google document absolutely changes the landscape of going completely paperless with iPads.  The clunky workaround of combining Pages, SendtoDropbox and Dropbox in order to get student work shared with the teacher would be much streamlined by conducting the entire process through Google Drive.

As an alternative to the process of writing in Pages, collecting research in Diigo and storing documents in Dropbox, I would consider jumping to Evernote to house the entire process.  Writing, researching and sharing could all be conducted within Evernote.