March 2020

Getting Started: Lessons learned! Last year I received an Ipad from a SET-BC Grant and I set it up within our school Apple ID and got APPs loaded and ready to go. I learned my lesson VERY quickly. We have a vintage set of Ipads in our school that aren't very functional - but they are still in circulation and a new set of Ipad mini's - somehow when I set everything up the ONE Ipad that I had in class became the "boss" of all Ipads. Meaning that it was the one that all the password resets, App purchases, error codes and everything under the sun came to! This didn't work out. It was incredibly frustrating - I was interrupted constantly while teaching and my students who needed to support their learning were interrupted even more. After a few months, I learned my lesson and started again. Their are pro's and con's to having a separate Apple ID. The con's include not having access to application already purchased by the school - APP's are coming down in price so much that it really only amounted to $30 - the interruptions weren't worth that amount. Any of my students with low literacy couldn't navigate all the pop ups and interruptions. Their learning is worth far more than that! The advantage was that I could add have more flexibility as to what I wanted to add and how I wanted to organize the device. Lesson learned - I don't want to be tech support for the entire school all the time!

Getting starting this time will be much much easier. I have requested that our IT set up the internet on the devices and leave the rest to me. I will need to reference the list of applications that are approved for Ipad use, which our district technology teacher has laid out.

After that... I need to dive into the learning being explored in my up and coming units!

Is there a lesson or a provocation you will use to introduce the project goals and technology to your students?

Due to the delay in timelines getting the technology, I need to reevaluate the ways in which I will introduce my project goals. The unit I had planned has already come and gone, there isn't much I can do about this now. My year plan is pretty set as I have a student teacher joining us in term 3. So I'll need to invest some thinking, planning and collaborating with my student teacher to re-evaluate what we will do.

To lighten up our learning on area & perimeter and multiplication/division of larger numbers we are going to do this challenge: https://robertkaplinsky.com/work/foil-prank/

And... I promised we pull it off in the school if they could prove to me it will cost less that $50

They will also hunt online for the best place to buy tinfoil! Financial Literacy, teamwork, area, perimeter, multiplication, division, decimals, estimation, project management... and an introduction to a new problem solving framework.