Tuesday Tech Tidbit

While geeking out on Twitter, I stumbled upon an amazing Apple Distinguished Educator who publishes slick videos on YouTube that quickly and easily demonstrate how to more effectively use the iPad in the classroom.   Jacob Woolcock is a computing and digital learning teacher in the U.K.  His iPad QuickTips YouTube channel provides viewers with easy-to-follow videos (often less than 2 minutes) that demonstrate an educational concept on the iPad.  His videos include tutorials on: iMovie Freeform Keynote Clips I appreciate how easy it is to follow these videos and then directly apply them to classroom usage.  If you are interested in brushing up your iPad skills or designing creative projects for your students, you should visit: https://www.youtube.com/@iPadQuickTips Have a wonderful summer! 🌞

Apple prides itself on including an impressive array of accessibility features that make the iPad user friendly to people of all abilities.  They are continually adding accessibility features, which can often be found under Settings > Accessibility but also in other places.   Accessibility settings allow users to adjust some of the following interfaces to make the iPad more universally usable: Vision VoiceOver Zoom Hover Text Display and text size Motion Spoken content Audio descriptions Physical and motor AssistiveTouch Touch accommodations Voice control Pointer control Hearing Live listen Sound recognition Background sounds Subtitles and captions Live captions General Guided Access Accessibility Shortcut I recently started to tinker with the Shortcuts app, which is included on all iPads and iPhones.  Shortcuts allow users to get tasks done quickly or through automating multi-step processes.  Apple offers an entire section of Accessibility shortcuts within...

Recently I stumbled upon a very handy website that contains step-by-step guides on how to use some of the most creative features of the iPad. Dr. Tolu Noah is an Apple Educator who creates iPad tutorials .  These help guides provide visual assistance on how to use some of the impressive multimedia features on the iPads.  Some of the guides include: Creating digital whiteboards using FreeForm Animating text and shapes in Keynote Using the Clips app to create engaging videos Using the Notes app for planning and preparation Personalizing lectures with Live Video in Keynote Screen recording Creating QR codes Although these iPad guides were created for higher education, they are definitely relevant for K-12 as well.  I hope you find some good pointers in here.  Please reach out to me if you get a burst of inspiration and wish to implement these features into a lesson or project.  Follow the link to view the iPad Guides: https://www.tolunoah.com/ipad-guides

Many teachers share slideshows with their students that demonstrate learning concepts.  These are particularly helpful when students want to access information from a past lecture or a tutorial.  Apple's amazing slideshow production app, Keynote, offers a simple way for you to add live video to a presentation. With Keynote's Live Video feature, teachers can insert themselves into a presentation so students can see and hear what they have to say about a presentation.  Instead of just reading text on a screen, students get to see and hear their teacher.  You can also use the rear camera on your iPad to record live footage of a concept you wish to demonstrate in your presentation.  This is a great way to bring students up to speed if they missed an important lab.   When used in conjunction with screen recording on your iPad, you can create movie presentations for your students or professional learning communities.  Quickly make tutorials that contai...

This week I am presenting you with a challenge.  For many years we have been using Google Docs for all of our word processing needs.  Since moving to the iPad, though, we have discovered that the Google Docs mobile app is severely lacking in formatting options and advanced word processing features.   Hiding in plain site is an app called Pages.  This app, made by Apple, is installed on all of our iPads.  Pages is a robust word processor with an intuitive interface and all the advanced word processing features we miss.  Since Pages is designed specifically for the iPad by the same company that made the iPad, it is a seamless experience. Some folks are afraid to use Pages because they feel it doesn't offer features such as collaborative editing, footnotes, and version history.  These features are absolutely included in Pages!  Plus, Pages offers a lot of multimedia options.  Inserting images on Pages is a smooth experience compared to Goog...

With a recent iPad system update (iPadOS 16.2), Apple released a new collaborative whiteboard app called Freeform .  According to Apple: Freeform helps users organize and visually lay out content on a flexible canvas, giving them the ability to see, share, and collaborate all in one place without worrying about layouts or page sizes. Freeform offers an unlimited canvas.  Users can continually add content and never worry about running out of space.  Within a Freeform board, users can add sticky notes, photos, videos, audio, shapes, charts, PDFs, and a wide variety of document types. You can use your iPad's camera to add photos and videos to a board.  Freeform magically appears as an app on all iPads that are updated to system 16.2.  Our school iPads are eligible to receive this update.  Please encourage your students to update their iPads so they can engage with Freeform. If an iPad's storage capacity is too tight to allow for a system update, please view my...

We are currently operating in two technology ecosystems:  Google and Apple.  Most of our word processing continues to occur in Google Docs, even though our students are working on iPad hardware.  As you might imagine, Google has made no effort to design a brilliant Google Docs app for the iPad.  The Google Docs app on the iPad is Captain Crappy.  I would rate it a solid D.   Why do we continue to use it then?  Apple makes a full-featured word processor called Pages, which lives on everyone's iPads.  Pages has all the document, text, and multimedia formatting of the major PC word processors.   Fun facts about Apple Pages: Pages allows for collaborative document editing.   Documents are automatically saved in iCloud.   Documents can be viewed and edited on any PC web browser using icloud.com . Documents can easily be submitted to Google Classroom.   Pages takes advantage of Apple's multimedia ecosystem, m...

If you have text on paper that you would like to scan and convert into digital text, then I recommend trying Adobe Scan.  This iPad app is available for staff and students in Self Service.   With Adobe Scan you can use your iPad to scan a piece of paper with text.  It will then use optical character recognition to convert the image into true text.  The text in the resulting PDF can then be highlighted, copied, and even read aloud.  (See last week's blog about Spoken Content on iPads .) The video below demonstrates Adobe Scan in action.  It's easy to use and does a great job of converting printed text into digital text.

In the days of Chromebooks I remember using an extension called Read&Write, which allowed users to highlight text and have the computer read it aloud.  The iPads have this feature built into its operating system, and it works great!  This feature is called Spoken Content . It is considered an Accessibility feature and is a great companion for students who benefit (or require) read-alouds for text. To activate Spoken Content, open Settings and then select Accessibility .  From there you can select Spoken Content .  You will want to toggle on Speak Selection and Speak Screen .  Speak Selection will activate a Speak button whenever text is selected.  Speak Screen allows the iPad to speak the entire screen whenever you swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen. Spoken Content works with all text, be it a website, a word processing document, and many PDFs.  In the settings you can switch on a Speech Controller, which provides a floating to...

Screen Recording using Control Center We've all been there. You plan to show a snippet of a video on YouTube. Your attentive students are watching. The following series of unfortunate events ensue: A bunch of advertisements start playing. You struggle to get the playhead to the right part of the video. The video buffers. Your students lose interest and start watching TikTok videos on their phones. Never fear. You have the power to avert this scenario by using your iPad to record a screen capture of the streaming video. By saving the video to your iPad, you can ensure that none of the above problems occur. You can then upload the saved video to Google Classroom. You can even add your own narration to the video while you capture it.  Watch the video below to see how. Videos that are saved in your Photos app can easily be uploaded to Google Classroom.  When creating a post in Google Classroom, select the Attachments icon and choose Pick Photo .  Easy peasy! For more informa...

The iPad is a powerful PDF editor.  Using the Markup tool, you can add text, shapes, arrows, sketches, and signatures to a PDF.  Teachers can use the Markup features to make corrections or suggestions on student documents.  In the video below I demonstrate the PDF editing features on the iPad.  I throw in a few tricks, including a method for replacing existing text with new text. Please reach out if you have any questions about editing PDFs on the iPad.  

In this tech tidbit, I demonstrate some slick shortcuts that make the iPad much more efficient to use.  There are some swiping motions that will save you time, as well as split view and slide over , which improve multitasking.  Do you hate the Google Docs app on the iPad and wish you could bring back the full-featured editing experience of the Chromebook?  You actually can do this, and I will show you how.  Take a look at the video below to pick up some shortcuts to make your iPad experience more efficient and streamlined.

As students produce videos for class projects, one impressive feature they might explore is the ability for their iPads to create green screen (chroma key) effects.  Using green screen, students can insert themselves into a completely different scene.  For example, students can deliver a news report from Paris, or they can walk on the moon.   Using the green screen feature in iMovie is super easy.  Students are invited to come to the media center to record their videos.   The media center has a green screen available in the Digital Den.  After the video is recorded, students will use the green screen feature in iMovie to superimpose their video onto a completely different background image or video.  Apple offers an iMovie tutorial that demonstrates how to edit green screen video on the iPad.  The video below also takes you through the steps. I encourage you to advertise green screen video recording to your students.  I welcome stud...

Using the Keynote iPad app, students can create amazing multimedia presentations that put Google Slides to shame. But once these presentations are completed, teachers want to be able to easily open them on their Windows computer and assess them in Google Classroom.  Impossible, you say?  Not at all! The secret to submitting full-featured, multimedia presentations into Google Classroom is for students to submit an iCloud link rather than a physical file.  The video below demonstrates how a student uses an iPad to submit a Keynote presentation (with a video!) to his teacher in Google Classroom.  The teacher then opens the presentation on a Windows PC and plays the full-featured presentation in the Chrome browser, all without leaving Google Classroom.  If you thought this was impossible ... watch on! By demonstrating how easily Keynote can play nicely with Google Classroom and Windows computers, I hope more teachers and students take the plunge and discover the am...

Your iPad offers audio recording capabilities that are very simple and easy to share.  The easiest way to record audio is to use the Voice Memos app.  This app allows you to record and edit audio files.  After you finish recording, you can easily share your recordings via email. Google Drive, Google Classroom, and more.  The video below demonstrates how to record and share audio files using Voice Memos. If you want to get more advanced with your audio recordings, I recommend installing GarageBand.  This app allows you to record multiple audio tracks, including voice and music.  

Your school-issued iPad offers 32GB of storage.  This storage can fill quickly if you install a lot of apps or save a lot of media files to your iPad.  Today's tech tidbit will show you a couple of quick actions you can take to free up some of that internal storage.  The video below will walk you through these easy steps.

Keynote is an incredibly capable program that can create multimedia presentations that run circles around Google Slides.  I highly recommend taking advantage of Keynote when assigning students projects that include multimedia presentations. When working with another teacher, I discovered that Keynote does not appear to allow streaming videos to be embedded directly into a presentation.  Keynote prefers to access videos directly from the iPad.  No worries mate!  It's fairly easy to download a streaming video and then embed it into a Keynote.  I recommend using the website btclod.com to download streaming videos (such as YouTube videos).  The video below demonstrates how to accomplish this. UPDATE!  The btclod website is blocked at Hudson.  You can instead try  https://www.youtubedownloader-online.com .   Let me know if you have any questions or need follow-up support.  🙂