A Paperless Paper Entry 6 Feedback and Revisions

Entry 6 Giving Feedback and Doing Revisions

If you haven’t read my previous posts on a paperless paper feel free to take a few moments to get caught up here.  Now we are ready for feedback!  Mr. Sims is using preview with the annotation tools to guide his students to a better piece of writing and contacting them using student gmail accounts.  

Students need to be able to view their annotated piece of writing and then edit what they have created.  My brainiac idea was to seek out some amazing, and by the way, nonexistent app that would allow students to look at feedback on one side of the screen and revise at the same time on their saved note on the other side of the screen. Essentially cutting the screen in half like two iPads.  If it does exist, it really isn’t that great of an idea because the screen size will be cut in half and that minimizes the experience of using an iPad to create a good piece of writing.

What I discovered is that sometimes the low tech solution is the way to go.  This low tech solution was evident in a training I did with an Apple trainer.  He was asked during an iPad training, “Can we highlight sections in an ibook for our students?”  He replied, “Of course!  Just walk over and highlight the text in their iPad.”  The solution was literally hands and feed.  I had to chuckle, because in our high tech world we expect our solutions to be so much more complicated.  

So the solution on viewing feedback and reworking student writing is going to be a simple four finger hand gesture on the iPad- no app necessary.  

Here is how it looks for work flow:
1.)  Student logs into their dropbox account
2.)  Student opens up their note that Mr. Sims has annotated over
3.)  Student opens up Notabiity and opens the note that is also saved in their Notability app
4.)  Now the student can take four fingers and gently swipe left and right to move back and forth between the two documents

In some ways, it might work better than paper in that the student is required to concentrate and understand the feedback.  Instead of having the paper right under their nose and looking back and forth, this method of swiping between apps demands a bit more concentration on the part of the student.  

I am anxious to see how the students feel about reworking their papers this way.  Check back in next week to see how our students are feeling about the workflow and experience!  

Writing by: Jennifer Krzystowczyk

@jennykbps

A Paperless Classroom Entry 5

Entry 5 Annotating over PDF's from Dropbox Using Preview

At last entry I was pondering our choices for providing feedback to our students.  I’ve since decided to go with the laptop tool Preview.  One reason is there just isn’t another iPad to go around and the second is that Mr. Sims is pretty comfortable in the laptop environment.  

So here is how you use Preview on a Mac to annotate over a PDF.  Once your PDF is open in Preview, click on tools on the tool bar menu.  From there scroll down to annotate.  Here you will find a variety of tools to use for marking up a PDF like a thought bubble, a speech bubble, arrows, shapes, and text. If I were still in 4th grade, I would much rather receive feedback in a hot pink thought bubble rather than a red ink pen, but that is just me. Take a look at the example below:  

Once the PDF has been checked over and some feedback has been provided to the students, the teacher can save it back to the dropbox folder for the students to view.  Using the students gmail account is another great way to communicate to the kids that feedback has been given. The great thing about this is that the students still have the copy in their Notability app so they can edit it based on the feedback given by their teacher.

So here is my next wonder..... How about a screen splitting app so they can view the feedback and their copy at the same time! Check in next time to see if I solve it!!!

Written by: Jennifer Krzystowczyk

A Paperless Paper Entry 4

Creativity in Notability and Exporting Files!
If you haven't read my previous posts about a paperless paper, take a few minutes to get caught up! Today's lesson allowed 4th graders to create new notes in the app Notability, do some writing and illustrating and export it to their shared dropbox folders. The students only had one folder created so this was basically just walking them through the steps.  After clicking on the “happy share arrow” they choose the email button> dropbox> folder> and export to dropbox.  Students were thrilled to go into their dropbox app and see their note sitting in their newly created folders.  

Once we got through these steps we let them have some free journal time.  The objective was to have them create a document and practice exporting it out to dropbox.  

These 4th graders were working for almost an hour on writing.  You could have heard a pin drop in the classroom.  These kids were so engaged!  Some students were writing full paragraphs and inserting in web clips off of Google and Wikipedia. Other students were using the drawing tool and illustrating their stories.  I love the creativity that is available in Notability!

 

Our next challenge is to allow Mr. Sims to provide paperless feedback.  We have two choices.  One is to use preview on the laptop and save the notes back to the dropbox folder.  The other is to scrounge up one more iPad and use Notability to annotate over student notes as Notability allows users to import a PDF and add to a note. Check back to see where we go with this decision and how it affects the work flow of our paperless environment!  

 Written By: Jenny Krzystowczyk
@jennykbps

A Paperless Paper Entry 3

"You came back!" said a bright eyed 4th grader as I was walking down the hall to my iPad group. Yes, I came back! How could I stay away? These guys were sharing out Dropbox folders to their teacher today. On this day we let the students get more familiar with dropbox, while we pulled students in small groups to learn how to not only log into their dropbox accounts but also their gmail accounts. 

This step is key in making sure each student remembers his or her student logins and passwords. We made sure that usernames and logins were the same for both accounts in order to avoid confusion. We also put the account names and password on a google doc and shared it between myself and @gtwitsims.

Here is what excited me the most about today's experience... Kids were writing right away using Notability. Worried about what they were to write, one student asked, "What's the topic of our paper?".
"Anything you want!" I replied back to him. 
With a huge smile he continued writing. These kids were ready to begin exporting their first paragraphs to Dropbox before I even got everyone finished with their sharing task. How great! This is going to be fun!

Written by: Jenny Krzystowczyk

@jennykbps