In May of this year, I purchased a FitBit Flex - a device to wear around my wrist that would help me to track my daily steps taken, nightly rest cycles, and to give me daily silent reminders through a vibrating alarm. Some teachers use the FitBit or other health trackers to ensure that they are up and moving all day. While my FitBit has certainly reminded me to get up and get moving more, I have found another use for it while teaching.

So, confession time: I am a very forgetful person when it comes to timing, scheduling, and keeping track of items like my keys. I could probably lose my keys while my car is running... it's that bad. So, if a brilliant moment of learning is going on, I completely forget that I am supposed to remind Student X to go take her ADHD medication or for Student Y to go to his small group lesson for Learning Support.  As I have settled into my new class for the year, I have several students who need reminders throughout the day about specific things, whether to check in with me on a behaviour issue, check in at the office for medication, or just to be sent to the Learning Support room for extra assistance with academic or social skills.

I have begun setting my FitBit silent alarms to go off throughout the day to remind me to do those things. That way, when I feel the device buzzing on my wrist, no one else hears it, and I can gently remind the student about what they need to go do, even if it is in the middle of something else important for the rest of the class.

I know this is a tiny tip, but it has already helped me enormously with remembering all of the "little things" that we teachers do to accommodate student needs. I hope it helps you, too!

Remind101 is a free, safe, and efficient way to communicate with students and parents via SMS (text) messaging.  You can sign up for the service on their website or through their iOS or Android apps on your phone or device. 

Remind101 does not give your subscribers your personal phone number and does not allow for them to reply to your reminders.  Likewise, you cannot access the personal phone numbers of your subscribers. Messages cannot be edited or deleted once sent, either. 

Once you sign up and create a class, Remind101 will generate a domestic phone number and unique class code so that subscribers to your class can begin to sign up.  Any phone that receives text messages will be able to subscribe to your class reminders.

Through both the web portal and the app, you can schedule SMS messages to be sent out at specific times.  Another cool feature is that if you are composing a message at a late hour - let's be honest, teachers work often work late - you will be prompted to schedule the message to roll out at a more reasonable time.  After all, your subscribers probably don't want to receive a text message at 12:30 AM! 

The text message interface is set up exactly as a regular SMS message.  In the screenshot below, I have sent the code to subscribe to my class texts, and followed the prompts sent back to set up the subscription.  Having your parents and/or students inputting their full name is important so that you can manage your subscription lists.  You don't want to have anyone on your subscription list that isn't a part of your class.

Near the bottom of this same screenshot, you will see that every time I send out a text message via the Remind101 web portal or iPhone app, my name will appear at the front of the text.  This will remind parents and students who don't save your Remind101 number into their phones that the text is from you. 

It is my hope that these instructions can help you get set up with this awesome app.  Communicating is easy when you have Remind101! 

This post will be available for future reference under "Remind 101" on my site. 

Today I, alongside one of my colleagues, had the honour of making a presentation to our local Rotary Club for their generous donation to Gordon Greenwood.  Earlier this year, the Club provided us with the funds to purchase our first 10 iPads and get our technology program off the ground for our special needs students. 

Before tonight, I'd never been to a Rotary meeting, and to be honest, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect.  I hadn't anticipated the "community" aspect of our role in this project and presenting in front of so many esteemed community members.  Though we were likely the youngest people in the room, we were instantly welcomed as peers and equals.  The inviting smiles and warm conversation occurred not only through our complimentary meal, but throughout the rest of the evening. 

The most important part of the meeting, though, was our presentation about how technology has impacted our school.  Our students are engaged and excited about going to Learning Assistance.  Kids who have difficulties with reading, writing, and math are getting the adaptations they need in order to be successful at school.  Previously resistant teachers are jumping on board after seeing the positive results of iPad implementation in the Resource Room.  A small grant from a local community club was turned priceless in the hands of passionate educators, a team of educators I am proud to say I've been a part of.

Bringing this success story back to the community members that made this possible was also priceless.  A comment from Langley City's mayor sat with me at the end of the Club's meeting. I may be paraphrasing, but in a nutshell, he said that any community outreach is fundamentally ineffective without passionate implementation behind it.  I agree 100%.  It's not enough for schools or outside agencies to buy technology just for the sake of having it in the hands of students - passionate people who believe in authentic and creative learning is equally as important to have as the hardware itself. 

Part of the technology plan at Gordon Greenwood has been to get iPads into the hands of our teachers and support staff in order to give them an idea of the possibilities that technology can  present for their students. A few weeks ago, Sarban Sangha, a principal at Lochiel U-Connect here in Langley, was kind enough to offer his services to provide a discovery session for our special needs educators. And more recently, I was able to finish the preparation of our teacher sets of iPads to release into the hands of our teaching staff.

In my opinion, there is nothing more empowering for a learner than hands-on experience. I could stand in front of a group of staff members all day and show them what they could do on an iPad, but none of it means anything to them unless they actually have the iPads in their hands. Moreover, I find that learning on devices is more authentic when the learner makes the discoveries themselves rather than through delivery of app knowledge. The part of these sessions that excites me the most hearing the little murmurs between engaged staff members, "Oh, this would work really well with [Student A]!" or "My low reading group could really benefit from this app!" or "This is a great extension for [subject area]." For teachers who are really stuck in the discovery process, I get them started with  apps like GeoBoard or FindSums that are user-friendly and immediately engaging and they usually move on on their own from there. 

After a few discoveries have been made and some play has ensued, most of the educators I've worked with have aligned themselves with the idea that the devices have something to offer their students.  Following this process, there will certainly be a more vested interest if you do want to introduce increasingly complex apps such as PDF annotators, note-taking, or file sharing apps. Or maybe you just want to show them how to buy an app. It's a neat challenge for teachers to look for apps that matter to their students and classroom, and I'm finding this far more valuable to staff than just me calling all the shots when installing apps. (And it's really fun for me to monitor their discoveries as my device is the Master iPad on our iCloud)

After weeks worth of work setting up iPads, purchasing and configuring apps and set-ups, and making small but important choices about logistics like log-ins and passwords, today was finally the day. 

What day, you might ask? It was the day that a few of our school's first 10 iPads made their way into the hands of our Learning Assistance students. 

I've been sweating about this because I want to make sure that lessons run as seamlessly as possible. The last thing I want is the teaching staff not recognizing the value of this connected learning tool. But today, I didn't need to worry about that because it turned out to be absolutely amazing. 

This pilot lesson took place in the block right before our first recess break - 10-10:30 am. The group of children in the lesson were learners who struggled with literacy concepts (all 3/3) as well as behaviour issues (2/3 of them). Our goal was to use this app to introduce some vocabulary in a story they had been working on. The kids each made a customized vocabulary list where they had to type in the word from the book's glossary and record themselves saying it. The app then integrates the vocabulary words into activities such as spelling, reading, and identification from a list with motivation to build characters like the one seen below. If they get stuck with the reading aspect, they are able to play back their own recorded voice to identify the word. This was something that got them very excited!

Previously, this group had a lot of issues completing their work before the recess bell rang. And if the recess bell rang, you might as well have packed it in anyways, because nothing else was going to get done with everyone else playing outside the classroom's windows. But not today. 

The kids finished up recording their vocabulary words just as the bell rang. They didn't even flinch and continued on playing with the language activities. Not even a glance outside toward the playground! Amazing. 

On Tuesday, when the group meets again, we will continue with a small review on the iPad before reading the story. Therein lies the crucial portion of the lesson - will we experience positive transfer from tablet to storybook? 

Over the past week, I have been working diligently at making sure that our set of 10 iPads for the resource room are ready for staff to use with kids. Through my research and the help of my PLN, I have found several apps that will work for our purposes, but I can say with certainty that we will be adding quite a few more over the next couple months. 

Of course, as any school starting up, we are running into a few snags:

1) Some apps require user accounts, such as Evernote or Dropbox. In this case, I had to make an additional email account for our school above and beyond our Apple ID (which is controlled by our Information Systems team in the district, not by the school). There's another username and password to remember for all the adults using the devices. On the plus side, it's the same sign-in/password for all the app user accounts. On the other hand, it's not the same as the Apple ID account we use to purchase the apps.

2) Even though I synced and backed up the Master iPad through Apple Configurator, the apps don't all hold account memory from device to device. Well, some do, some don't. When I sync a new iPad or a set of them, I still have to go in to manually link up apps to each other (eg. TopNote to Dropbox) and sign-in to all apps with accounts on every single iPad. Now this isn't so bad with 10, but definitely would be a major pain when setting up class sets. I'm hoping this doesn't have to occur every time I reconfigure the set-up which, again, is something I anticipate doing fairly often in the coming months. 

3) Apps themselves have limitations that we didn't expect. Like Dragon Dictation - it's an amazing voice to text app , but when the work is complete, it only is capable of sharing the file via email or social networks. So rather than consistently using a simplistic file sharing app such as Dropbox, students are forced to share their work through different mediums from app to app. 

If you have any experience with any of these topics and would like to share your knowledge, I would love to hear some advice and feedback. This is my first time doing this and I may be overlooking some silly details. This is learning! :)