Technology @ Hebron

Apple has recently released a major update for the iPad called iOS 9, which includes a number of important productivity improvements. We would like everyone on campus to upgrade to this version by going to Settings: General: Software Update and following the instructions. It will take around 20 minutes for the upgrade to take place. After upgrading you should go to the App Store and make sure all of your apps are updated as well.

The two big features of iOS 9 are:

1. Split-screen multitasking, which lets you swipe from the right of the screen to open up and use a second app:

When this second app is open you can also swipe down from the top of the screen to choose another app to have open.

2. Picture in Picture, which lets you watch a video and use other apps at the same time. In this mode the movie is resized down into a small movable window:

When watching a video you just need to tap this icon to enter this mode:

This is great for watching videos and taking notes at the same time. At the moment this feature only works with videos played in Safari but other apps should be updated to support it soon.

To get an overview of both these features take a look at this screencast (you can ignore everything after 2mins 30seconds as our iPads don’t support this feature):

As mentioned in both faculty training and student orientation we are not subscribed to the Office 365 program so therefore have limited access to Word, PowerPoint and Excel on the iPads. These apps are available but only for viewing files.

However with our current Google Apps and Pages, Keynote and Numbers setup on the iPads it is still possible to create Microsoft Office document types – students just need to export their work.

To do this in the Google Docs app, tap on the three dots icon in the top right-hand corner of the document you want to convert:

Then tap Share & Export:

And then choose the Save as Word option:

This creates a copy of the original Google Doc file as a Word document which can then be shared or emailed as normal. This workflow is the same in Google Slides (to create PowerPoint files) and Google Sheets (for Excel).

If your students are working in Pages they can convert the file to a Word document by tapping the Share button and selecting Open in Another App:

Then choosing Word for the selection grid:

And finally choosing Google Drive as the destination app:

This will create a new copy of the file in Google Drive as a Word document which can then be shared, etc. These steps work in Keynote and Numbers to create PowerPoint or Excel files also.

iBooks Author is a free app for the Mac that let’s you (or your students as a classroom project using the iMacs in the library) create professional and interactive ebooks that can be read on the both the iPad and Mac using the iBooks app (or exported as an ePub or PDF for sharing through email or Google Drive).

iBooks Author is similar in design to something like Pages, and you construct your book from text, images and other resources – the big difference being the layout of the document and the interactive elements you can add. It’s basically a much more advanced version of the Book Creator for iPad.

When you first load iBooks Author you can select from various template designs for your book:

And then edit the document by replacing the template content as well as using the various text, shape and formatting options in these toolbars:

With additional formatting and design options available within the inspector:

As you build up your content you can start to add new pages, chapters and sections to create the structure of your book (from which the books contents page will be automatically created):

Finally, as mentioned above a big feature of iBooks Author is the ability to insert interactive elements, including review quizzes, which are accessed from the Widgets drop-down:

If creating an ebook with, or for, your classes is something you are interested in, you can download iBooks Author using this link and it is installed on all the iMacs in the library. You can also view Apple’s help guides here and we recommend this quick start ebook and this more detailed publishing ebook from O’Reilly Media.

According to Wikipedia: “Flipped classroom is an instructional strategy and a type of blended learning that reverses the traditional educational arrangement by delivering instructional content, often online, outside of the classroom and moves activities, including those that may have traditionally been considered homework, into the classroom. In a flipped classroom model, students watch online lectures, collaborate in online discussions, or carry out research at home and engage in concepts in the classroom with the guidance of the instructor”.

We have helped a number of teachers setup workflows for recording flipped classroom videos and our recommendations to make this process as simple as possible are detailed below.

Recording Yourself

The quickest and easiest way to create a flipped classroom video for your students to watch outside the classroom is to record yourself in-front of your whiteboard. Simply setup your MacBook or iPad to record, deliver your class or lecture, trim the start and end of your video and then upload and share this video through Google Drive. You can find further help on audio and video recording here, and iPad specific instructions here.

Blendspace

One tool we recommend to package together videos (either recorded by you or existing content from video sites like YouTube), documents, links and other resources into an online lesson is Blendspace. Each of the resources you choose for your online lesson can be embedded into a grid and the students then go through each resource in order. So you could add some content overview text first, then perhaps some technical drawings, then a video and finally some review questions.

Here is an example of what a student might see after you have created a lesson, with each box in the grid linking to a different resource:

And here is a good overview of the service:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ_Mg3lSoew

Using Explain Everything

Explain Everything is a multi-purpose app available to all faculty on their iPads and one feature is that the app can record your actions when creating any kind of project and then export those actions as a video (again to be shared through Google Drive). So you can create presentation slides, annotate PDFs and record your voice all within the same project and then turn that into a video. Further information on Explain Everything can be found here, with section 4 focusing more on creating flipped classroom recordings.

EDpuzzle

Another online tool we recommend is EDpuzzle, which lets you add interactivity to videos you have made or existing video content from sites like YouTube. You can import or upload a video and then use EDpuzzle’s editing features to crop, add text and audio notes as well as questions and quizzes at specific times within the video.

You can see an example of what can be created here and below is a good tutorial taking you through the different parts of EDpuzzle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8377YLHrdwU