Tech Tuesday Resources

Many of us, at some point in our education or career have used PowerPoint to present to an audience. Best practice dictates that we focus on content oriented information, with engaging images, in short, talk-able bullet points. But, what if we used PowerPoint for more than presenting to a group, what if we used to to help us study or to organizer our thoughts.

With the iPad version of PowerPoint, some built in app features and add-ins will give our students new tools to explore and learn content.

Students can create and share their own "Study Stacks" or can edit teacher designed Interactive Notebooks to share their thinking about a variety of topics. For more information see below.

Before you have your students access PowerPoint on the iPad, be sure they are logged into OneDrive. This will ensure that students are ready to save their work in the Cloud, so that they can access it from anywhere.

Need help with that? Check out this post on Managing and Storing Documents.

Study stacks would replace your traditional flash cards. Students can create a PowerPoint presentation that will allow them to study things like vocabulary, important people and dates, or processes.

With PowerPoint students can bring those flashcards to life by adding text, images from sites like Britannica Image Quest, original images, drawings and even short videos that they make to help clarify difficult topics.

Using PowerPoint to Reach Augmentation and Modification levels of SAMR

• Collaboration - students can "share" their PowerPoint with other students to create a collaborative study stack in a small group. One person creates the PowerPoint and shares it with other group members, using the "Invite People" icon (see image above). Students can work simultaneously by adding their own slides.
  
• Differentiation - You can have advanced students create study stacks for developing students to study their words and have them use the Mutiple Choice Quiz Add-In periodically to create content checks along the way. See the video below for how to do that.
  
• Sharing Divide the work, and have students post their study stacks to a class discussion thread on Schoology so that they can use each others' work to study
  

Interactive Digital Notebooks are your more traditional interactive notebooks ,made even better with technology. Instead of spending time gluing and getting pages stuck together for custom content and Marzano style graphic organizers that are added to a notebook, you or your students can insert images of graphic organizers into PowerPoint slides, and have the bonus of adding custom made student images, drawings or videos to enrich the content.

Using PowerPoint in this way will be able to hit the SAMR Augmentation and possibly Modification levels of integration depending on whether or not students share their work or collaborate and give each other feedback using the share features.

Why PowerPoint and not OneNote for this?
PowerPoint is a good option for work that your students need to create and turn in for a grade or for work you want them to share with each other for collaboration or discussion purposes. While OneNote Class Notebook can be used in a similar way, it is difficult to share work and turn it in.

OneNote is best for formative assessment, or "thinking" work that teachers don't necessarily need to collect. PowerPoint Interactive Notebooks are best for those assignments teachers plan to take a grade for, or to help enrich discussions. Students can upload their work to a Schoology discussion, or invite a collaborator to work through a project.

I have a few Interactive Digital Notebooks in our Schoology FTIS Edtech Groupthat will get you started. The video below will show you how to access the PowerPoint from an iPad, although you may also do it on Schoology from your desktop. You can also see and download the notebooks here. Right now we have a Vocabulary notebook and Reading: Literature. Look for notebooks for informational texts, research, project design and writing to come.

Do you want more Interactive Notebook selections? Email me and we can work together to develop ideas that meet your needs and content!

Questions? Please feel free to email me at the address below.

Email: heidi.neltner@fortthomas.kyschools.us
Website: http://ftisedtech.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @heidinelt