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Chrome Tablets in Your Future, Part Two

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

If you find yourself with a Chromebook tablet in your hands, it will be sure to amaze you, as we learned in Part One of this blog series. While Do Ink’s green screen app is missing with no equal app,  there are many apps that work great on this device. In a G Suite EDU environment, Chrome tablets interact well with Google tools.

From Gmail to Drive and Docs, Slides, and Sheets, Chrome tablets work. Students can switch to a keyboard with a Chromebook or desktop, but a lot of the work can begin on tablets.

Enhancing Curriculum with Chrome Tablets

Here’s a chart of great apps for use on Chrome tablets. You can find a few great charts of Android, Chrome Web Store, and G Suite EDU apps via Kathy Schrock’s list. You can see a small part of it below; be sure to visit her website for more awesomeness.

See ALL of Kathy Schrock’s amazing charts online at Kathy Schrock’s Guide to Everything- https://www.schrockguide.net/bloomin-apps.html

With Chrome tablets, you might find this list handy for elementary students. The about section for each app includes edited excerpts from website product descriptions. Unless otherwise mentioned, links take you to the Google Play Android store. No G Suite EDU items (e.g. Drive, Docs, Slides, Drawings, etc.) are included in list.

Productivity Apps

  • Book Creator: Book Creator is a simple tool for creating awesome digital books. Create your own teaching resources or have your students take the reins. Works via browser, too.
  • ChatterPix Kids: Create silly greetings, playful messages, or creative cards. Use ChatterPix to take a photo, draw a line to make a mouth, and record your voice.
  • Read&Write: An easy to use alternative keyboard with integrated features. It assists you in writing content. Features include touch and hold to hear text read aloud, word prediction, and more. Works via browser as well.
  • Seesaw: The Learning Journal: A student-driven digital portfolio that facilitates communication between teacher, student, and parent(s). Available via web browser as well.
  • Google Translate: Translate text and audio between 59 to 103 languages. Includes camera picture translation, two-way instant speech translation, and more.
  • Snaptype: Take a picture of a paper worksheet or form. Students can then complete the digitized version on phone or tablet.

AR/VR/Gaming

  • Bloxels EDU: Create characters, build a world, and tell your stories. When you’re ready, publish your games.
  • Galactic Explorer for MERGE Cube: Hold the solar system in the palm of your hand. Watch as the planets revolve around the sun. Explore the texture and color of each planet’s surface. Discover interesting facts as you navigate through space.
  • Dig! for MERGE Cube: Mine and build to create holographic 3D worlds you can hold in the palm of your hand. Choose from unlimited resources. Resources include stone, sand, grass, brick, and lava. Make anything you can imagine.
  • Object Viewer for MERGE Cube: Upload, view, and share 3D objects on MERGE Cube. This can include a sculpture of Michelangelo’s David or an original work of 3D art. You can also view items that you have created. MERGE makes it easy to turn your models into holograms you can hold in the palm of your hand.

Assessment

  • Imagine Learning: Teach language and literacy to students through engaging, interactive instruction. This mobile app is a companion to Imagine Learning’s cloud-based services. It provides access to the extensive curriculum activities. Also look for Imagine Español® which teaches Spanish language and literacy skills. Those skills include letter and syllable recognition, reading comprehension, and vocabulary development. Another is Imagine Language & Literacy®. This one is a language and literacy software program for ELLs and struggling readers. It also has worked with early childhood education and SPEC ED students.
  • Imagine Math Facts:  Teaches students math facts through engaging activities. Activities focus on multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction. Automaticity and math fluency are the goals of each activity.
  • Istation: Provides paid access to digital instruction and educational resources. Those include Istation Reading, Istation Español, Istation Math, Writing Rules! with Calvin Cool, and Teacher Station.
  • MIT App Inventory/MIT AI2 Companion: An intuitive, visual programming environment. It allows children to build functional apps for smartphones and tablets.
  • NWEA Secure Testing:  This is the web-based NWEA™ Secure Testing app. It makes it possible to complete their K–12 assessments in kiosk mode using Chromebooks.
  • STAAR Online Testing Program: This is secure browser software. Schools use it for administering the STAAR Online Testing Program.

Chrome Tablets in Your Future?

Looking for a less expensive, robust alternative to iPads? Chrome tablets may be the tool of choice for thumb-typists. My takeaway? Wait for higher-powered tablets. In the meantime, I hope these apps and links may provide you with some helpful information.

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ChromebooksCTO/CIOGoogle Tips and TricksTechnical Support

Chrome Tablets in Your Future, Part 1

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

If you are getting ready to deploy new technology to your district, you may want to ask yourself a few questions first. Many of us as technology directors have gone through hardware deployments. Whether it’s laptops, iPads, docking stations, digital projectors, or some other hardware, problems can arise. No matter what you imagine as the perfect deployment, a mosquito will crash land in the ointment. And, often, these initiatives are top-down. The superintendent wants it, and your job as technology director is to make it happen.

What happens when the technology is the Chrome tablet? In this two-part series, we’ll explore some ideas for deploying and using them in schools.

Why Invest in Chrome Tablets?

Chrome tablets are easy to manage and app rich. Chrome tablets, like their keyboard-empowered equivalents, Chromebooks, come with a management license that makes it easy to set them up in bulk. This affords them a level of pre-deployment setup not available for other tablets. That means that you can have apps loaded for new Chrome tablets in a rapid manner.

Conway Wharton shares the following perspective:

“We have been using the Acer Chromebook Tab 10 tablets.  They are much easier to manage than the iPads, as well as being less expensive.  Once the teachers see what is available on them, they are very willing to switch.  From an IT perspective, it’s very easy to add applications. You seldom have to touch the tablets.”

In this blog entry, we’ll explore some of the apps you will want to consider. The app ecology is quite rich and Chrome tablets include web browser extensions as well as managed apps.

Questions to Ask in a Major Hardware Deployment

Here are a few questions that you must ask as an organization. Some of these will seem obvious. But what makes technology deployments fail is sometimes the obvious stuff. That includes communication, training, and managed expectations more than the esoteric technical issue.

1) What’s the point of the deployment?

“Our goal is to provide every child and staff member with the tools they need to be effective in the future.” That’s not an uncommon goal for hardware deployments. The question is, “Is that enough?” Experience has shown people the answer.

Consider John Hattie’s definition about the deployment of one-to-one (1:1) devices:

Many laptop or computer devices (iPad, netbook, tablet computer et al.) programs attempt to provide laptops to each student in a class or school.

What is the likelihood that 1:1 programs will accelerate student achievement? John Hattie’s meta-analysis of the research says, it’s “likely to have small positive impact.” With an effect size of 0.16, which is significantly less than the 0.40 in an average classroom, it’s not enough. Other changes besides deploying hardware must happen in order for the effect size to be more substantial.

With this in mind, we have to approach the goal of any hardware deployment another way. We must put technology together with high-effect size instructional strategies. Your superintendent needs to say something different. That might be something like the following:

“We’re going to focus on teaching and learning strategies that work. If it’s not evidence-based, we’re dropping it. We will use technologies that enhance the impact of these high-effect strategies. And we’re going to model that in classrooms. We are going to support it with a student-centered coaching model.”

2) What’s the magic mix of technologies that we can use to enhance teaching and learning in schools?

The magic mix is a combination of several technology selection criteria:

  • Cost effective
  • Easy hardware to support and manage
  • Works well in the target space
  • Enhances high-effect instructional strategies

Let’s explore each of these items in turn. We can use the Chrome tablet as one example.

Cost Effective?

It depends. Chrome tablet pricing remains mid-to-high compared to other devices. Initial reviews of tablets show they are under-powered when compared to competitors. That aside, is a single-use device “good enough” for a grade K-3 classroom?

Easy to support and manage?

Yes, the Chromebook management license available with tablets makes support easy. This makes it ideal for schools who have small technical support teams. The addition of styluses, front/back cameras, and USB-C make it easy to work with. Chrome tablets are often ruggedized, drop-resistant, and have reinforced ports. Some places where the tablets shine in hardware include:

  • Battery life
  • Cost
  • Setup (you can even get white glove service)

Works well in target space?

Chrome tablets work great in various settings. If tablets lend themselves to creativity and assessment, they are a winner. Can you snap photos with the tablet, arrange them in Google Slides, add audio? Yes. Can you assess students on STAAR, NWEA MAP, or Istation? Yes.

Enhances high-effect instructional strategies?

It depends on the strategy, but you can use Chrome tablets to enhance strategies. For example, concept mapping (0.64) works great with a stylus and a tablet.

Coming Soon: Enhancing Curriculum with Chrome Tablets

Stayed tuned for the next part in this series where we’ll explore the instructional niche Chrome tablets can fill in schools.

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ESL/ELLGood TeachingGoogle Tips and TricksiOS Tips and TricksMicrosoft Tips and Tricks

Tablet Trek: Tablets in the ELL Classroom

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

“Beam me up, Scotty,” said Captain Kirk from the surface of the M class planet he stood upon. He fiddled with his communicator. That was strange. No signal. Turning to one of the students, he asked, “Lend me your iPad, will you?” If you’re ready to join Captain Kirk and other Star Fleet officers, come along on this voyage of discovery featuring tablets in the English Language Learners’ (ELL) classroom.

To Boldly Go

In this blog entry, we will explore various approaches to blending technology into the language learning classroom. Our focus is on how to strategically empower language learners to make their thinking visible. Tips on how to save, collect, and share work using key apps will also be discussed in the context of a project-based learning activity.

Key Area 1 – Mapping Your Learning

Mapping digital representations of learning can be one significant way to make thinking visible. Some ways to accomplish that include:

  • Narrated slideshows
  • Enhanced ePubs/ebooks

The benefits of creating these types of items in your classroom is that they allow for a combination of audio/video and text in an engaging way. What are some of the ways student-created ebooks are used in your classroom?

Tools and Apps

Key Area 2 – Flipping Your Learning

Ready to flip learning in your classroom? You will want to watch this short video shared by Navasota ISD’s Todd Nesloney. It features an end-of-year interview with fifth graders.

tablet trek

Tools and Apps:

Key Area 3 – Creating Non-Linguistic Representations

Greater than fifty percent of learners are non-linguistic. This involves students generating a representation of new information that does NOT rely on language. Robert Marzano says “the average effect [of using non-linguistic representation] includes a seventeen percentile point gain in student achievement.” Wow.

For language learners, consider that “when students make concept maps, idea webs, dramatizations, and other types of nonlinguistic representation, they are actively creating a model of their thinking.” Building virtual worlds in Minecraft: Education Edition can “encourage exploration and experimentation by allowing learners to manipulate their learning experience and visualize results. When students then explain their models, they are putting their thinking into words” (Source).

Tools and Apps:

    1. Padlet.com or the Padlet app
    2. Popplet Lite app
    3. Chatterpix
    4. Graphic Organizers
    5. Infographic Tools:
      1. Thinglink
      2. Canva
      3. Easel.ly

Key Area 4 – Making Interactive Print-Outs and Pictures

You can make interactive print-outs and pictures using augmented reality (AR). You are able to augment real artifacts and objects that may be around with images, audio, and text. Add QR codes to augment real objects, adding voice or video links.

Tools and Apps:

Key Area 5 – Blending Products with App Smashing

App-smashing is when you give students a specific assignment that can best be solved using more than one app.

Tools and Apps:

Key Area 6 – Classroom Tablet Management

The final key area involves relying on tools like NearPod and Seesaw to quickly share lessons and assess students, as well as gather student work on devices. NearPod and Seesaw empower teachers (and students) to create assessments and turn in their work via tablets like the iPad, as well as other devices (e.g. Chromebook, MS Surface Pro). Using Seesaw, students can turn in their work. Teachers review and approve the work for sharing in the class blog (see example).

Want to Know More?

If you are interested in learning more about these tablet trek away missions, fill out a workshop request form to have it facilitated at your school, district, or education service center. You will take on the role of one of Star Trek’s famous captains and explore the various tools and apps embedded in a Star Trek away mission.

 

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