1. From Possibilities to Practice:
How the iPad is Changing Science Instruction
Derrick Willard
Matt Scully
Providence Day School
Charlotte, North Carolina
22. Enviro Sci
paperless goal
collaboration in Google Apps
projects
digital text
collaborative blog
note taking apps
whiteboard paparazzi
field guides
formative assessment tools
Welcome. I am Derrick Willard, Science Department Chair at Providence Day School in Charlotte, North Carolina. And this is Matt Scully, our amazing Technology Director.\n
You should know a few things about me. First, I’m a serious scientist. Really.\n
These are some of my tools to discover relationships. \n
Some relationships are simple. Like the more rain that falls in a region...\n
the taller the vegetation it can support. Other relationships are more complicated-counterintuitive (inverse).\n
I’m also a gardner, and this is my favorite tool store...\n
It has walls and walls of tools...\n
and seeds...\n
to help me grow food.\n
Finally, I’m an educator.\n
These are some of my tools...\n
To help me build relationships AND help brains grow...\n
This is Matt. He helped me shift...\n
We are here today to describe how a device helped shift my instruction. Diagram taken from:\n21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times\nBernie Trilling & Charles Fadel\n2009\nJossey-Bass\nSan Francisco, CA\n
So, I would like to describe my journey-with help from Matt, without whom none of this would have been possible.\n
What were our initial goals?\n
Let’s go back in time and discuss why we had to do some training. iPad comes out April 2010. In our 4th classes by spring 2011-Matt gave me one to experiment with in hopes of using in Costa Rica June 2011. At the time NONE of these kids had one...\n
I coined this term in May of 2011. At first I was thinking of the device as a “swiss army knife” but I settled on this by May.\n
Tried to go to the tropics with no paper, except a text and field guide. We did. We did most of the work here. This is our project page. Cut to Alice’s bird page...\n
Travel journey-rotating scribes.\n
First attempt at a “flipped classroom” - preloaded content to watch on the road and discuss later.\n