Tech Tips Tuesday

Notability for Observations

Last week I wrote about using the Inkflow App for iPad to record observations of a student teacher. When I saw him on Wednesday, he said he'd really liked the format of the observations - in particular the combination of text and image, and found it helpful that the notes were in digital format which was emailed to him, and thus harder to misplace! He asked if I could do similar again for his lesson on Fairy Tales.

Instead of using Inkflow again, I decided to give Notability a try as it seems to be a more popular app, was recently free as App of the Week, and seems to have more features available. I was pleased with my experience with it, and decided to use it for my soccer team's training session in the afternoon as well.

Features I love:

• It's very simple to add a caption to photographs as you add them to your page.
• The zoom function with the magnifying glass is helpful when writing by hand. Alternatively, zooming and moving can also be accomplished with two finger touch.
• It has audio recording for the page and multiple voice notes can be recorded and managed with the settings button.
• Audio can also be sent via email - resulting in a zip file.
• When typing you can choose up to three favourite fonts to select with one touch
• The highlighter is handy
• You can easily set up folders to manage the notes more efficiently
• Notes can be automatically backed up
• Files can be duplicated, meaning that if a template is set up for regular types of notes, students can just duplicate the template and create a note according to the same structure.
• The search feature allows you to search typed text in all notes

My struggles:

• I found it hard to edit the pictures after I moved away from them. I couldn't find a way to get back into them to resize etc without undoing the previous moves until the handles returned. This would be annoying if I'd continued to write etc before trying to edit the pictures. After additional research, I found that the double tap on an image with two fingers is the answer to this dilemma!!
• New to a hand rest section, I am finding it a little bit of a struggle to adapt. When using it I kept finding that my hand kept switching me between open apps!

All in all, I am finding Notability very useful as a teacher, and would like to see how students could use it to record their thinking in class as well. 

Screenshots taken from National Football Curriculum being read in iBooks.
Student names removed for privacy.

Tech Tips Tuesday

Inkflow for Observations

At the moment I have a student teacher working with me on Wednesdays. It has been going well and he has been trying out some creative ideas which bring the learning to life for students. This week I tried using the Inkflow app on my iPad to record some snapshots of the lesson he taught and jot down my observations and suggestions. I felt that it was great to be able to record the photographic evidence along with my notes. It was also easy to go through with the student teacher and send on to him.

As I haven't used it for awhile, I found that there were a few things that I didn't remember to take full advantage of eg. Zooming in and moving around using two finger touch. I also found that as I turned the iPad landscape, I neglected to fill the whole page before moving onto a second page.

I recently got Notability and plan to try it out as I make the observations this week. It seems to have more options for recording, so I look forward to seeing how I can make use of the additional features. Hopefully it will be just as useful for sharing the page/s.

I'm still here!

This term has been absolutely crazy, and this is the first chance I've really had to quickly catch my breath. A lot of what has happened has been hush hush, so not only has it been difficult to find time to write, but a lot has also been unwritable until now. So this is a quick post to catch you up.

Pre-service Teacher
I have had an excellent pre-service teacher with me, and she has been doing a lot of the teaching, particularly toward the end of her prac. The class did some really great work with her, and I had an opportunity to observe students and collect more data for report writing than I ordinarily could. As I have been doing less teaching, I have also been creating fewer classroom resources for TPT, but hopefully that will change a bit in the weeks to come.

NEW JOB!
This is the big one!
As you all know, I have been raving for years about the wonderful school that I am part of, and this year has been a particularly good one, with a great teaching partner/team and students. I couldn't be happier. But as I've explained to my students, sometimes you have to make a decision with your head, not just your heart. As someone who doesn't like change, particularly when things are going well, it's been very hard for me to make the jump.

Mobility is built into my school system such that teachers need to move to another school after a given amount of time, and this can be negotiated out to a maximum of ten years. I have already completed a number of years (and bits of years) at my current school, and thus wouldn't be able to see my son go through the school while I teach there. This is important to me as a matter of convenience and also connection to my son and his schooling. Given that, over the past couple of years I've been working towards a position in another school I'd love to work in, and it all came together for me this term. This new school is in the private sector, so I have had to resign from my current position, which is a really scary thought to me after 11 years!

The process took up a good part of the term with interviews and a demo lesson, and all the other bits that need to be pulled together. I've also been trying to familiarise myself with the new setting and have been using my "at home day" to visit the school and get to know the students/parents/staff. It's been an effort to juggle two work settings and home as well, but we've managed somehow.

It's not an ideal time of year for a class shift in Australia, but at the same time, everything has slipped into place for both class groups and both are having a successful transition/hand-over.
As I am now going full time, I have had to find additional care for my little guy, which has been a bit of a stress. As mum's know, it's hard to concentrate on doing a good job if you are worried about your child, and there are a lot of guilty feelings tied in with it. On the bright side, it is looking like my little guy may be able to join the preschool at my new school next year, thus making child care much easier.

So that's mainly what has been going on in the background this term, and what has eaten up any time I might ordinarily have had for blogging. The next couple of months will be hectic too, as I adapt to the new setting and write reports for these students, but hopefully I will have time to blog as well.