Start with a Question

By Ross Cooper According to EdTechTeacher , “ App Smashing is the process of using multiple apps to create projects or complete tasks.” According to Wikipedia , inquiry-based learning “starts by posing questions, problems or scenarios – rather than simply presenting established facts or portraying a smooth path to knowledge.” The Problem On many occasions, I have seen/read about App Smashing being leveraged in a way that is entirely anti-inquiry. In instances such as these, an overly contrived and smooth, risk free process is followed, all for the sake of a “cool” product. Here are directions I pulled from a real project: Using iMovie , shoot a scene of two actors portraying characters from a novel. Use the speed editor in iMovie to speed the video up slightly. Save the video to your Camera Roll. Open 8mm , pull the previous video from the Camera Roll, and use the “1920s filter” on the video and resave to the Camera Roll. Open Tellagami and use a...

Class discussions are always valuable, but only for the students who participate in them. I suppose some shy students who would rather listen benefit from hearing the discourse, but the maximum learning experience occurs for those students who are part of the give and take. And neither of these roles is as valuable as being part of a collaboration. Padlet has allowed me to assure 100% participation while giving students to time and space to think carefully about what they want to contribute before it is published to their classmates. It provides a space for them to collaborate, rather than just discuss.  Here are a few scenarios in which my students have benefited from pooling their ideas on Padlet before anyone speaks out loud. Share What They've Learned from a Reading My 9th graders were recently learning about Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, the famous tsars of Russia. Rather than assign long primary source readings that can feel overwhelming, Jessica Baile...

When guiding students through a long term research project over the course of many months it is imperative that the teacher can: assist with finding informative and reliable sources help with proper citations track student progress give tons and tons and tons of feedback provide encouragement when students get discouraged But then what? Once the project is done, how will the world know what a monumental achievement your students have accomplished?  Going paperless helps them carry it out and then share it with the world. My high school sophomore classes recently wrapped up a 3 month research project on the causes of the American Civil War.  The entire project was paperless.  Here's how we did it: Step 1: Introducing the Project Students learned that they would be researching an event, chosen from a list of options, and would be creating a scrapbook of primary sources.  The scrapbook would start with an introductory essay and would tell the story of ...

App-smashing, according to Greg Kulowiec , is: I'm just starting to venture into app smashing as my high school students become more familiar with a variety of iPad apps.  I don't think app-smashing is something that I could have feasibly done much before this point in the year because I needed to familiarize my students with a foundational list of the apps that we will use all year long. Once they have that knowledge base and experience, they can create all kinds of products! The Topic This past week my sophomores created videos about the European Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 .  I wanted to do more than teach them the history; I wanted them to investigate a complex question. We talked about what makes a revolution a success or a failure.  As a class, we agreed on how to design a scale of success and failure for political revolution.  You'll see these scales later in their final products. Getting Started First, they accessed the event summar...