Exploratorium 2012: Bayer, Roseann

Table #14  iPads For Annotation and Engagement

 Audience:       Middle                

Presenter:       Roseann Bayer                                                           

                        I.S. 143 Eleanor Roosevelt

                        511 W. 182 Street

                        NY, NY 10033                                     

Library Web site http://www.m143.bibliocommons.com

E-mail  Rbayer@schools.nyc.gov

Description, Goals, Intended Outcomes: 

             A special education teacher and I received a New Visions for Public Schools eReader Grant, in which we proposed using iPads to teach students how to annotate text. Our intent was to exploit the iPad’s ability to let students actively read and respond to nonfiction text. We anticipated that students’ interaction with various texts via an annotation app would motivate students to practice using nonfiction text structures to increase their understanding of the text as a whole and to deeply engage with a text by recording their responses by highlighting, underlining, and inserting written notes. Furthermore, we were confident that teaching annotation skills would serve as a foundation for lively class discussions filled with textual references, more nuanced understandings of the content, and well-defended argumentative writings.

            After exploring some of the annotation apps available, we decided that GoodReader best fit our needs. This app permits users to mark up PDFs with text highlights, freehand drawings, lines, arrows, rectangles, ovals, cloudy shapes, text underlines, strikeouts, and “sticky notes.” It also lets you create folders, move, copy and rename your files, and send your files to other apps. By connecting one of the iPads to a projector, we planned on modeling the use of GoodReader with PDF articles selected from the NOVEL databases before distributing the iPads to the class.

Process to Develop and Implement this Project:

            My colleague anticipated that she would be ready to teach the World War II/Holocaust unit by the time we would have received the iPads and had time to practice using GoodReader. We also explored the many ebooks available at Titlewave that would support this unit. (We realized only later that we would not be able to annotate these ebooks using Goodreader.) We created a pre-unit assessment to see how many nonfiction text features students could identify and we interviewed the class to get a sense about their general attitudes about reading nonfiction. Both assessments confirmed our sense that this class had few strategies for attacking nonfiction text and had a largely negative view of reading it. By selecting high interest articles to be read and annotated on the iPad, it was our hope to expand their perception of what could be interesting, worthwhile reading, as well as make them more skillful readers of nonfiction.

Budget:

Seven iPads - $3493.00

Apple Care for all iPads - $ 546.00

VGA Adaptor - $29.00

GoodReader app- $4.99

Timeline:

January – Apply for New Visions eReader Grant

February- April – Research and experiment with various apps intended to permit or support annotation of electronic texts. Select articles from EBSCO databases to support WWII unit. Create pre-unit assessment.

May – Begin teaching lessons on using the iPad and Goodreader, purpose of annotation, WWII and the Holocaust articles that will support the unit’s essential question: How do competing views of power and morality lead to global conflict?

Evidence of Outcomes, Possible Adaptations, Lessons Learned:

While this project is still a work in progress, the primary lesson I have learned is that you can never allot enough time to learn new technology, troubleshoot issues related to the school wireless network, or install and practice using  applications. Despite the fact that the content area teacher owned her own iPad, we both required more time than we anticipated to get all of the apps to “talk” to each other.

Common Core State Standard(s) addressed:

Reading Standards for Informational Text, Grade 8:

Cite the textual evidence that most strongly supports an analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

Writing Standards, Grade 8, Production and Distribution of Writing:

Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.

Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to present the relationships between information and ideas efficiently as well as to interact and collaborate with others.

Information Fluency Continuum (IFC) Skill(s) addressed:

Standard One Indicators

• Understands the organization of information and uses strategies to locate information within a resource
• Uses reading, thinking and visual literacy strategies to derive meaning from information and monitor own understanding
• Selects, paraphrases, summarizes and records appropriate information in reflective and interactive process

Standard Two Indicators

• Creates personal responses to literature using technology
• Uses prior knowledge to connect to and form personal meaning from nonfiction
• Deepens understanding of the source by analyzing the parts
• Uses text feature to increase understanding

Skill(s) taught: Identifying nonfiction text structures (cause and effect, sequence, problem/solution, description, compare and contrast) and nonfiction text features (caption, subheading, bullets, inserts, bold words, etc.), annotation, use of iPad along with GoodReader and other apps listed below:

Dropbox

EBSCO Databases 

EBSCOhost app

Destiny Quest app

Follettshelf    

Resources Used:

GoodReader app