Volume 28, Number 2
March/April 2012

Harvard Education Letter

Star Apps Lift Learners Through the Clouds

By DAVE SALTMAN

Would political rivals Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas tweet about their series of oratorical face-offs? 

They just might.

Today, the commonplace prompt asking classes to write to a leader or historical or literary character is being displaced by online assignments that ask students to inhabit the world they’re studying using social networks anchored in the cloud—aka cyberspace. 

In the sciences, apps and online tools encourage self-directed exploration and practice that go beyond simply memorizing formulas and facts. Collaborative peer tutoring becomes possible, pushing the learning task from teacher to students. 

As Richard Beach, a University of Minnesota professor emeritus of English education, points out in a forthcoming book, Using Apps for Learning With Literacy Across the Curriculum, apps and Web tools are “fostering new ways of knowing and learning,” whether students work collaboratively or independently.

Real Roles

Though it may grate on some educators like a texted wedding invitation, one online charter school is finding that ubiquitous Twitter can give kids a firsthand sense of history. Working with TwHistory, a hub for reenacting historical events using Twitter, the Open High School of Utah (OHSU) gave students the assignment to research the civil rights era Freedom Rides and tweet about the events over the course of a month. At OHSU, about 500 students are instructed online by remote, credentialed instructors using a virtual curriculum.

The school’s curriculum director, Sarah Weston, explains that students wrote and released tweets in the character of the era’s actors, something highly appropriate for a school with students separated by miles. “If it’s not in the cloud and it’s not collaborative, it gets thrown out,” Weston says of the school’s philosophy on applications use.

Elsewhere, teachers are using Facebook and MySpace to pursue similar activities, though a Facebook crackdown on “multiple identities” (do famous and dead count?) may disqualify it from this usage. Other hybrid social media sites, like the social scrapbooking site Pinterest, are finding their way into classrooms. Students can search online resources and display their contribution to a virtual pinboard on the subject of European debt woes or any other prompt. 

Practice Is Perfect

Students, some as young as seven years old, are finding that whatever device they use, there is a lesson being offered on that platform.

Amber Kowatch’s second-grade class at Franklin Elementary School in Ludington, Mich., is learning how to tell time down to the exact minute using Clockmaster on their iPads. The class is making that important leap from apprehending numbers on an analog clock to mastering the entire clock face, including those mysterious unlabeled marks (minutes), as well as associated time concepts.

This allows Kowatch to manage her practice while providing much-needed repetition. She explains, “I can differentiate instruction” as students work from their individual points of understanding, and they can “practice as much as they need to.” Once students have mastered a concept, the app moves them to the next one.

For mathematics, Kowatch likes Splash Math, a free iPad app gaining currency in the edusphere for its ease of use and deep bench of practice problems. She uses the app as a resource for teaching two-digit subtraction and other skills; it e-mails her a handy summation of student scores for its online activities.

Older mathematics students gain from SyncPad, which math teachers at South Belton Middle School in Texas use, for example, to illustrate geometrical proofs and algebraic equations. The app functions like a remote, cloud-based whiteboard. Students can see the teacher drawing on a blank space or existing document, and students can then collaborate, drawing on their version of the same document.

Always On

Autonomous learning on devices cuts both ways: There’s nowhere to hide from class materials for device-wielding students more inclined to view top-trending “epic fail” clips rather than explore titration or Tudor-era English. Enter Remind 101.

Missy Feller, a teacher and technologist at Benjamin Bosse High School in Evansville, Ind., who helped pioneer the school’s one-to-one laptop program, offers often-distracted seniors a chance to sign up. When they do, Remind 101 then e-mails them reminders about quizzes and due dates. The site hides the students’ e-mail addresses to protect privacy.

For Feller’s peers around the world who carp “You either did, or did not, read the chapter,” solutions other than ibuprofen do exist. For auditory learners who struggle through Shakespeare or have trouble pronouncing gallimaufry, iScroll (for iPad) and Librivox both offer free audio books. And while the iPad app scrolls the text one is listening to, nothing stops a non-Apple user from running Librivox while simultaneously following along on a free digitized book site like Project Gutenberg.

Another favorite of Feller’s students is QuizLet, a Web-based flashcard app. It’s so useful that students have asked her for it even if she has left it off the lesson plan.

Up in the Clouds

As lessons head for Cloud-Computer Land, paperless studies become more viable. Poster board presentations, while tactile, hark back to the relatively Jurassic pre-Internet epoch. Prezi, a presentation program, keeps winning classroom-based converts because the input is so easily manipulated and because it’s easy for students to use when collaborating. Pairs or groups use Prezi to incorporate pictures, graphics, or video into slide-based presentations on any topic—from Great Expectations to Ivan the Terrible.

That describes another popular slide creation tool, SlideRocket. Teachers from OHSU sang its praises at a recent webinar. Weston likes the way students (and teachers) can embed media from other sources and work together virtually. A free version, SlideRocketEDU, is bundled with Google Apps for Education. 

Like Prezi, VoiceThread often appears on many teachers’ lists of favorite apps. Students at OHSU use the audio annotation tool to work out math problems while doing a think-aloud, letting the teacher formatively assess whether they have actually mastered the underlying concepts. Students can also share these with each other, engaging in peer tutoring, Weston says. 

Also free is Dropbox, which cannot go unmentioned because it’s everywhere. The mushrooming online application allows teachers to upload documents for their students, which can then be pulled down at random from any device. Yes, Google Docs also allows for storage, although many teachers like the former’s functionality, which synchronizes data across platforms. 

That should help your school’s iPhone-using Abraham Lincoln and Android-using Stephen A. Douglas work together—even while campaigning against one another—before, during, and after the final bell.

Always On

Autonomous learning on devices cuts both ways: There’s nowhere to hide from class materials for device-wielding students more inclined to view top-trending “epic fail” clips rather than explore titration or Tudor-era English. Enter Remind 101.

Missy Feller, a teacher and technologist at Benjamin Bosse High School in Evansville, Ind., who helped pioneer the school’s one-to-one laptop program, offers often-distracted seniors a chance to sign up. When they do, Remind 101 then e-mails them reminders about quizzes and due dates. The site hides the students’ e-mail addresses to protect privacy.

For Feller’s peers around the world who carp “You either did, or did not, read the chapter,” solutions other than ibuprofen do exist. For auditory learners who struggle through Shakespeare or have trouble pronouncing gallimaufry, iScroll (for iPad) and Librivox both offer free audio books. And while the iPad app scrolls the text one is listening to, nothing stops a non-Apple user from running Librivox while simultaneously following along on a free digitized book site like Project Gutenberg.

Another favorite of Feller’s students is QuizLet, a Web-based flashcard app. It’s so useful that students have asked her for it even if she has left it off the lesson plan.

Up in the Clouds

As lessons head for Cloud-Computer Land, paperless studies become more viable. Poster board presentations, while tactile, hark back to the relatively Jurassic pre-Internet epoch. Prezi, a presentation program, keeps winning classroom-based converts because the input is so easily manipulated and because it’s easy for students to use when collaborating. Pairs or groups use Prezi to incorporate pictures, graphics, or video into slide-based presentations on any topic—from Great Expectations to Ivan the Terrible.

That describes another popular slide creation tool, SlideRocket. Teachers from OHSU sang its praises at a recent webinar. Weston likes the way students (and teachers) can embed media from other sources and work together virtually. A free version, SlideRocketEDU, is bundled with Google Apps for Education. 

Like Prezi, VoiceThread often appears on many teachers’ lists of favorite apps. Students at OHSU use the audio annotation tool to work out math problems while doing a think-aloud, letting the teacher formatively assess whether they have actually mastered the underlying concepts. Students can also share these with each other, engaging in peer tutoring, Weston says. 

Also free is Dropbox, which cannot go unmentioned because it’s everywhere. The mushrooming online application allows teachers to upload documents for their students, which can then be pulled down at random from any device. Yes, Google Docs also allows for storage, although many teachers like the former’s functionality, which synchronizes data across platforms. 

That should help your school’s iPhone-using Abraham Lincoln and Android-using Stephen A. Douglas work together—even while campaigning against one another—before, during, and after the final bell.

Dave Saltman is a teacher, tutor, and writer in the San Francisco Bay Area.