Jillian Hall – English Faculty
I teach Secondary English at Oxley College. I encourage the use of different technologies in the classroom and was excited at the prospect of exploring the capabilities of the iPad. Initially, I felt that the iPad was limited as I could not transport files via USB and did not have access to word processing. I thought that it might be useful only for web searching and we already had computers which could download websites much faster.
After a few months ‘playing’ with the device myself, I discovered the ease and convenience of cloud storage with dropbox.com and the ability to annotate and share web sites with diigo.
I chose to use the device with my Year 10 class during a close study of Macbeth. The class had previously completed a unit on humour where students had contributed to an academic blog so they were used to the tone and language required for sharing their ideas respectfully.
In previous years students would read the play as a class and use post-it notes to annotate the text. This year I identified an online version of the play, bookmarked it in diigo and invited students to share it. Using iPads the students read sections of the play in pairs and annotated it via diigo. This way they were able to share and respond to the ideas of other students in the class and to questions and ideas that I had added to the text. The text was projected onto a screen so that annotations were visible to everyone throughout the five lessons we used to read through the text. Students were then required to compare annotated scenes with film versions which had been uploaded to the school web site.
I would run this activity again as many of the students found it invaluable to be able to read and exchange ideas in this way. It was beneficial for quieter students who might not contribute during class discussion. In future, I would spend more time adding questions and sentence starters as support and higher order thinking questions for extension so at the task was better differentiated. I would also encourage students who wanted extension to bookmark other sites and essays on the text with some comments recommending them to other students. I would set much clearer goals for each lesson so that students knew when they had achieved a target.
Unfortunately, I think the novelty of the iPad was a distraction to some and only a few students actually added annotations to the text. This will be overcome as they become more familiar with tablet devices. I can imagine that, for some students, this will be a fairly constant issue and a challenge for the teacher to monitor which applications are being accessed by every student, particularly when they each have their own device.
Because our final task was an essay comparing Shakespeare’s text with some film versions it would have been useful for the students to access YouTube. Students could take screen shots and annotate these using Pages or Word. This is a very real issue for English as visual literacy is an essential component of our courses.
