Documentation Using Technology

"Stand aside for a while and leave room for learning, observe carefully what children do, and then, if you have understood well, perhaps teaching will be different from before." 

- Loris Malaguzzi 

Inspired by the work of Reggio Emilia, UWCSEA East infant teachers have been exploring documentation to make learning and thinking visible. The role of the teacher in this process is to observe the students carefully, look for those significant moments, and capture images/videos together with examples of student voice.

This documentation is brought to their teaching teams so they can interpret it, explore options for next steps for the students involved, and make connections to the curriculum where relevant.

We had the opportunity to present to the infant teachers about ways technology can help support the documentation process. As you can imagine, technology is a natural fit for this sort of process, so we had lots to share.

Our presentation is below. We would love to hear your ideas about ways technology can enhance the documentation process. Leave us a comment!

Digital Bytes 19th September 2016

	Google Photos Features You Need to Know About If you aren’t using Google Photos now, you should be. Here are great features of Google Photos that you may not know about. My favourite is the ability to search by keyword. Try it out. Type a keyword like ‘writing’ into the search bar and you will see all the photos with people writing. It. Is. Amazing.
	The 28 Best Hidden iOS10 Features Everyone Should Know REMINDER: with our school devices, we are not yet updating to iOS10, but here is a sneak-preview of some of the coolest new features available.
	20 Practical Ways to use Google Forms in Class/School Matt Miller hits us again with a bunch of practical, tried-and-tested uses for one of our favourite tools: Google Forms. Do you have any to add to the list? We would love to collect more great examples!

Digital Bytes 5th September, 2016

	The Zen Art of Managing Smartphone Photos We get a lot of questions about the best way to manage the photos on your phone. Here are 3 ways to backup your photos from your camera roll that will save you time and energy.
	Calling Screen Time Digital Heroin is Digital Garbage You may have seen an article calling screen time digital heroin. This article take a critical look at that article and its claims and provides a rational viewpoint.
	How to Extract an Image From Google Docs We often get asked how to download an image that has been placed in a Google Doc. There are a number of ways to do this including publishing the doc to the web, saving it as an HTML file and a google docs add on.

Using your iPad or iPhone as a Remote to Control Your Keynote

Keynote gives you the ability to control your presentation from an iPhone or an iPad. This allows you, as the presenter, the chance to move around and not have to stand beside your computer.

Your notes from your Keynote will be available to you on your iPad. You can tap the screen or swipe from the right to the left to advance your slide or you can swipe from the left to the right to go back to the previous slide.

To connect your iPad to your computer, they both need to have Keynote open and be connected to the same wifi network. The tutorial video below shows the screens side by side in real time and will help you connect Keynote on your iPad to Keynote on your computer.

Keynote remote setup from UWC South East Asia on Vimeo.

Another fantastic feature of controlling your Keynote from your iPad is the ability to draw on the slides.

Digital Bytes - 29 February, 2016

	Managing Photos on Your iPad and iPhone Some great tips for working with photos that you have already captured on your iPad or iPhone. Did you know you can quickly select multiple photos by dragging your finger over them? Did you know that you can search for photos by location or date? Have a look at some great tips in this article.
	Mathematics in Real Life This YouTube video playlist has a number of riddles and maths problems that you can use with your class. These are a great source to engage your students and explore problem solving with your class.
	7 Teaching Resources for Film Literacy With the Oscars this week, it is a good time to look at film literacy. This site has a number of resources to help teachers including an interview with Martin Scorsese on the importance of film literacy and a number of activities and lesson plans.

Digital Bytes - September 21, 2015

This week's digital bytes includes articles about a free ebook on capturing digital stories, 11 quotes by famous writers and accompanying writing lessons, and using technology to help students read faster and with better comprehension.

Obvious to you, amazing to others: iPhone as a wireless document camera

Today I had one of those "why didn't I think of that?" moments as I was visiting a teacher. He asked me about a way to allow a student or two to mirror their screens through his laptop to project to the class. We tried a couple of options including Reflector and Airserver without great success (laggy, froze the AirPlay receiving computer) and decided to do some updates and try again another day.

As we were having a bit of banter afterwards, he mentioned that he's used Reflector a bit in his class. So I said, "Oh? How do you use it?"

and then he dropped it on me... one of those obvious ideas that just ticks a lot of boxes with me because of it's simple, yet really effective for learning. He, of course thought it was no big deal.

Turns out, he's been using his iPhone, mirroring with AirPlay to his MacBook running Reflector as a wireless document camera! Brilliant.

He walks around the room and monitors students as they're solving problems. When he sees one he'd like to display, he turns on AirPlay mirroring, opens his Camera app and just holds it above the paper as the student is working. The image is projected clearly on the board in the front of the room.  Sometimes he also simultaneously records video of the process or snaps a photo at the end that he'll later post to the class Google site.

There's loads of potential for this to be used in just about any setting including students who have their own iOS devices showing their own work. I'm just grateful that he mentioned it to me, even though it seemed obvious.

Talk nerdy to me... using Siri, Dictation, Speak Text, and Google Voice Search

As I was prepping for a recent demo-slam event, I took some time to explore and rediscover some cool voice features on your Mac and iOS device. In this post, I'm going to highlight six cool things with you can do just by talking nerdy to your computer.

System requirements: Mac with Mountain Lion 10.8.x; iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch device with iOS 5; internet

Dictation on iOS devices -  Dictation came along with iOS5 and is available on our new iPad 3s. Whenever the keyboard is visible, the dictation button will be just to the left of the spacebar. Press it and speak and whatever you say will be translated into text. Dictation gets to know your speech (and you'll adjust as well) so that the more you use it, the better it gets at transcribing what you say.

1. Write in Google Docs: using dictation on your iOS device, you can open and edit Google docs. Open the Google doc you wish to edit and press the "edit" button. Then, place the cursor where you'd like to write and press the dictation button. Speak what you'd like to write and it will appear as text in the Google doc. 

Dictation on your Mac - Dictation comes to your Mac running OS 10.8.x "Mountain Lion." By default, it is activated when you press the "fn" key twice. I'm actually writing the rest of this post by speaking directly to the computer. To use dictation on your Mac, you need to put the cursor in the document in the place where you'd like the text to appear. The next, you press the function key twice and speak. Your speech is transcribed as text.

2. Comment on a Google doc: use dictation to speak your comments. In the Google doc, highlight the word(s) that you'd like to refer to in your comment. Select the "Insert" menu and choose "comment." Then press the "fn" key twice and speak your comment. Press enter when you're finished an your comment is transcribed. 

Siri - OK, so Siri, Apple's voice activated personal assistant is not exactly new, but I really don't see people using it around campus. (Maybe it's because she can't understand their accents?) Siri is functional on our iPad 3s we have available for check-out. What you can do:

3. Open applications: ask Siri to "Open Brushes" and the brushes app will open automatically. This is great when working with younger children who would have difficulty navigating and finding the right app or searching using the keyboard.

4. Find answers: when you ask Siri a question that is part of Wolfram Alpha's vast database, (see examples) she'll return the answer to the question and valuable background information related to the topic. 

Speak Text on your Mac - allows you to select text from anywhere on your mac and have it read back to your. See this guide on how to set it up.

5. Give your eyes a rest: reading on screen (or in print for that matter) is not recommended for extended periods of time. Optometrists recommend following the "20-20" rule - take a twenty second break to focus your eyes on something distant every twenty minutes. Open up the web-page text you'd like to have spoken, highlight it, right-click and press "speech" and "start speaking".

6. Proof listen: by using text to speech, you can listen to your written work and sometimes catch mistakes that your visual processing centers would not have caught. 

Speak Text on your iOS device - works similarly to the way it works on the Mac. Enable it following this guide, highlight the text you wish to have spoken tap on it and select "speak".

Voice search in Google - this feature doesn't work from every localization of Google (google.com.sg for example) so you need to first type in the URL for the non-localized search http://www.google.com/ncr

Happy searching!




What wonderful ways can you think of to use voice tools on your Mac or iOS device?  I'm thinking a conversation between Siri, Dictation and Speech to Text is in order.