Effective teachers are self-reflective. They think critically about what they do and they work continuously to increase their effectiveness. But the habit of improving your skills through critical self-reflection is not unique to effective educators. It’s something experts in any sector do. It matters in education and it matters in education technology. Ed-tech journalist Audrey Waters made a powerful case for the importance of critical self-reflection in edtech recently by presenting “The Audrey Test”, an assessment for techies to identify what they do and don’t know about education. I have to admit that I’ve worked in technology and I now work in education, and after reading her assignment, I’ve got some serious studying to do.

What’s going to be on the test?

The purpose of the test is to ensure that education technology entrepreneurs understand education research and policy in addition to how to build effective internet technology. The test starts off with important questions that gauge the utility of any good tech tool:

• “Do you work closely [with] your potential users (teachers or students, for example) about product development?”
• “Is your tool available across platforms?”

Then she asks test-takers to tackle education theory:

• “Who is Paolo Freire? John Dewey? B.F. Skinner? (Why does knowing these names matter?)”
• “How do things like “self-efficacy” and “stereotype threat” shape learning?”

She moves on to pointed queries on education markets and public policy:

• “How many K-12 students own a cellphone? A smartphone?”
• “Who pays for technology in the classroom?”

Then she closes with focused self-reflection:

• “Are you an autodidact? Is everyone?”
• “Have you ever taught? Have you ever taught online?”

Waters took her cue for the proposed exam from Stack Overflow co-founder Joel Spolsky’s “Joel Test”, a checklist of things that the experienced coder argues effective software development teams must do to be successful.

How do you study?

Do I think that any edtech entrepreneur would benefit from mastering at least 80% of the content on “The Audrey Test”? Absolutely. Do I think that’s what she’s demanding? No. One key point of her post (and the “Joel Test” she is riffing on) is that effective edtech innovators must be self-reflective. They have to ask what’s missing in their projects and they have to think clearly about why they’re trying to solve a certain education problem with technology.

Mr. Pratt self-reflects, deploys technology

At the beginning of this school year, I prepared each of my four sections to begin using our class set of iPads. I had three classes of girls up and running, but my boys class was not meeting my expectations for classroom behavior. There was no way I was going to let them use iPads, I told them, if they couldn’t follow basic procedures for entering the room and preparing for class.

I sat down with a mentor and walked through a typical Teach For America exercise in self-reflection, asking:

• What were my mindsets (beliefs, assumptions) about these students?
• How did those mindsets drive my actions in the classroom?
• How did my actions create student mindsets?
• And how did those student mindsets drive student actions?

A few minutes of honest reflection led me to conclude that I was assuming each day that my boys class couldn’t meet my behavior expectations. This meant that rather than encouraging the block of students that was on point, I was simply waiting for class to go haywire long enough that I declared “No iPads” for yet another day. This reinforced for my off-task students that they couldn’t meet the expectations, so they continued to misbehave. My thinking drove their actions.

I didn’t break the cycle with a new technology tool (even though we had 30 iPads at our disposal). And there wasn’t a specific education theorist I turned to. Instead, I sat down with a colleague and said “What are the gaps in my thinking? How can I get better at managing this class so I can teach with new technology?” My test, like Audrey’s and Joel’s, was about self-reflection. I changed my focus from the off-task students to those who demonstrated they were ready to use the iPads. Showing that I believed in them changed student mindsets and behaviors across the class. That made room for the iPads to support academic achievement.

So if you’re a teacher, a coder, or an entrepreneur interested in education, take “The Audrey Test”, and if you don’t pass, that’s fine. Build on what you do know, go learn what you don’t, and reflect on how you, your team, and your project can continually increase in effectiveness.

I recently got a question from a corps member in Colorado who has a new set of iPads to use in her classroom. She wanted to know how to set blocks on certain apps in order to keep scholars on track. Since I’ve used a class set of iPads since September, and since classroom management is one area in particular where I’m always trying to improve, I’m acutely aware of the issue. Short answer: managing middle schoolers on iPads is not really possible through iPad restrictions. It takes a combination of investment, management, technological tweaks, and effective instruction. Here are some of my lessons learned, but I would love to hear from others with digital tools in their classrooms how they address management.

This is a tough issue in part because I don’t love thinking about “how you can stop kids from doing things.” But iPads are designed for consumers to do lots of communicating. They were not designed with Lee Canter’s classroom management techniques in mind. And I teach 7th graders, who are wily and bent on pushing every barrier they can find.

Setting restrictions (Settings > General > Restrictions) is the best thing to do, but there is not as of yet any easy way to lock down the iPads to the point that students won’t play around with other unrestricted apps, or the Internet. But here are my concrete recommendations from a year of using iPads in a middle-school English class, where four sections of students share a set of 29 tablets:

1. Set the restrictions to disable everything but Safari (see above). Make sure your restrictions passcode is something you’ll remember but your kids won’t guess immediately. Several of my students cracked my first code–I think because they saw me enter it. Use the same passcode on all the devices you have in your room.
2. This means that you have disabled “Installing Apps” which is in my mind the most important thing you can do to calm curious tapping. Angry Birds and Temple Run are both free and oh-so-tempting.
3. Associate all the iPads with a single Apple ID account that you control. You can use your personal account, but I have an entirely separate one. One issue is that you must associate a credit card with the account, so I use very strong password and never let the kids see me type it in.
4. Below the list of “Allow:” apps on the Restrictions page, there’s also a list of “Allow Changes:” for Location and Accounts. Flip the setting that stops users from adding or changing accounts, otherwise there will be a strong temptation plug personal Yahoo emails.
5. Bear in mind that the most important app you will probably want students using is Safari. But that is also the app curious students will use to watch YouTube videos, Google image search for shoes and candids of Lil Wayne and Nikki Minaj, and hop on Twitter. Facebook, thankfully, is blocked at the network level in our district.

Aside from that, it’s all about management, not iOS settings. “The iPads are tools for learning, not socializing,” was my mantra for the first weeks of school. Also all students, even ones who enter mid-year, must sign and have their parents sign an “Acceptable Use Policy” contract. My principal made this a requirement when she agreed to let me use the iPads, and I’m very glad she insisted on it (you can download it as a Word doc here). Be serious about setting expectations and consequences for misuse. My kids know that their iPad goes right back in the locking cabinet if I see even the corner of a Twitter screen. (“That was there when I logged on, I swear!” they say).

Another thing that I’ve found very effective for keeping students on task but with iPads open is simply turning my presentation for the day into a .pdf document and having them open it and scroll along during my minilesson. Here’s the presentation from a recent class to give you an idea of what that looks like.

They see this static version on their iPads, and I have a version in Word on my projector that I add notes and commentary to while teaching.

Again, these are recommendations that worked for me; they’re not research-tested and I would hardly claim to have perfected technological classroom management. Drop your suggestions in the comments!

The first two columns show results across classes for a set of questions on deciphering vocabulary words. The second two columns aggregate results for a set of six related questions on organizational patterns in informational text—patterns like main idea & supporting details, cause & effect, and chronological order. (For a bigger screenshot, click here.) It’s clear from the swaths of red down the second two columns that all of my classes needed additional support to master identifying and analyzing organizational patterns. Drawing this conclusion during the first week of March was particularly important because by that time, I had one week before the Maryland State Assessment. I needed to make the most of those five instructional days.

Looking to my assessment data in order to make teaching decisions is of course a standard TFA practice. And I could have done this with my district software, Edusoft, which also handles scanning answer sheets & analyzing test data. Here’s part of what an analogous report looks like in that platform:

The same information is there… if you cross-reference the indicator codes with their full descriptions and know the thresholds for the “Basic” band. In short, it was a lot easier to see what standards I needed to reteach once I had my data in Kickboard. Fortunately, the entrepreneurs behind the software (who include several TFA alums) have built in a feature that allows users to upload Edusoft data. That meant I could follow all my administration’s protocol for administering and storing the data from the assessment, but I could then move it over to the far more legible and user-friendly Kickboard system, which is also where I track behavioral data and parent contacts.

(Full disclosure: Kickboard was a partner on the January EdcampDC, which I helped organize.)

The Kickboard feature set is too big to cover in one post, but the group is out ahead of the pack in building a powerful Student Information System that integrates academic data and behavioral information. The software is already in wide use in the New Orleans school district, and for the next few weeks, the company will run a private beta test with 15 users. Participants will get free lifetime access to the platform: sign up here and more info below, but registration for the beta closes Wednesday.

Below, I’ll run through the process I went through to get Edusoft data into the system. The fact that you have to move information from one system to another to get better analytical tools is a fact of life at the moment, but systems like Kickboard are growing, and it’s up to classroom leaders to leverage them. When teachers can show administrators the link between new platforms like this one and student achievement, then we can make stronger arguments that resources should go to these nimble startups, not to the entrenched companies peddling mediocre data tools at the district level.

Moving Data from Edusoft to Kickboard

These instructions will make the most sense if you have Edusoft in your district, but they should also give you an idea of the Kickboard “assessment scorecard” interface.

1) Export assessment data from Edusoft as an “Item Response Report.” This will generate an Excel document that shows how each student answered each multiple-choice question on the assessment:

2) Create a new “assessment scorecard” under the Academics section in Kickboard. This is essentially a flexible data set for results from one assessment that you can then dissect multiple ways:

3) Next, you align each of the questions from the assessment with standards that you’ve previously entered into the system:

4) Now that you have the standards and questions aligned in Kickboard, you upload the (somewhat messy) Edusoft spreadsheet, check that the student names all match up, and viola:

Did Kickboard allow me to make the best instructional decision for my students last month? I believe it did. But I’m waiting on the Maryland State Assessment data to come back before I can be sure.

More on the Private Beta

This info comes from the Kickboard staff, who are interested in assembling a team of data-loving beta testers: If you’re interested in free lifetime access to the software, apply for their invitation-only private beta. Thousands of teachers currently use the tool for behavior and academic data in the schools that subscribe to Kickboard, but they want to learn more about how it can be just as effective for individual teachers.

They’ll give you free lifetime access, training, and support. In return they expect you to use Kickboard for 6 weeks, answer 8 short surveys, and potentially do a ten minute phone interview. They’re only accepting 15 testers, so if you’re interested sign up now. The beta starts this Thursday, April 19 and runs until June 1, but you’ll need to apply using the short form linked above in the next 48 hours to get invited.

I knew going into teaching that having a Google Voice number would be useful for staying in touch with parents and students. Nearing the end of my second year in the classroom, I don’t know what I would do without it. In this post, I’ll show you how I use Google Voice as a Parent Relationship Management system and I’ll highlight an even more powerful parent content tool that alumni in New Orleans are building.

Google Voice is a free service that gives you a single phone number that works independent of whatever phone you have. It can direct calls to your cell, a land line, or a work line. It lets you dial numbers by clicking on a contact from within a web browser. It integrates phone numbers with your Google contacts. It can even handle texts and recording and transcribing voicemail messages. Here are the key features that make it invaluable for me.

Dialing From the Web

When you describe this–click on phone numbers and your phone rings and connects–it doesn’t sound that awesome. Then you have a disruptive student who’s escalated his or her attention-seeking behavior past your consequences for lost points or individual conferencing. There’s little that will redirect classroom attention faster than pulling up Google Voice on your projector, searching for a parent contact, clicking “call,” and then hearing the cell in your pocket ring as it connects you directly to their work phone. (Click the image to embiggen.)

A Local Number

This might not seem important at a time when remembering phone numbers isn’t critical and when the friends’ numbers stored in your cell have area codes from all over the country. But remember that anyone who calls you from a land line will be much more likely to do so if they can make a local, rather than long-distance, call. Also, it’s nice street cred to have a local area code. Since I’m from Atlanta, my direct cell number begins with 404, but I’ve been in Washington, DC, for six years, so I feel more at home with a 202 area code. Google Voice lets you pick the area code and gives you a choice of numbers.

A Professional Number

Wait, why would you want another phone number when you already have one? As a teacher, this is useful because you now have a highly portable “professional” number in addition to your personal cell number. I give the phone’s 404 number to friends and family, but am liberal with sharing my 202 Google Voice number with students, colleagues, parents, and, well, anyone I’m willing to email (it’s in my signature). Moreover, you can create groups of contacts with separate rules about how calls get handled. Calls from colleagues might go straight to your cell. Parent calls might go to your classroom phone, but then get directed to a special parent voicemail if you’re unavailable. Calls from unknown numbers might require the caller to announce his or her name before connecting (very useful if crafty middle schoolers decide to prank call late on a Friday night).

Automatic Call Logging

Being able to place a call with the click of a mouse becomes even more useful if you have several calls to make all in a row, as it saves dialing or time spent scrolling through contacts. But what really makes calling 10 parents more difficult is logging the date and substance of each call. Let’s face it–if you’re making lots of calls, its very easy to just skipping the logging, even if you know it’s a good idea or your administration requires it. But Google Voice logs time, date, phone number (and contact), and duration, for every call placed, received, or missed. It even lets you add notes to individual call logs. This means that if I can’t member the last time I called a parent, I can just scan through my placed call logs and see it was two weeks ago. (Click the image to embiggen.)

Dash: A Tool for Next-Generation Parent Engagement

Google Voice is great for teachers, but it isn’t designed for teachers. Dash is a smartphone application under development that “organizes and tracks parent-teacher communication, helping teachers make frequent and well-informed calls.” Three entrepreneurial corps members designed a system that would streamline managing all this parental engagement information and flew it to a Startup Weekend in New York. The idea took second place and the team regrouped in New Orleans to begin beta testing.

You can learn about Dash and help get the venture off the ground by making a donation on their Start Some Good page. Here’s their promo vid:

I can distinctly remember studying for finals in college and pouring over academic articles I’d read and carefully annotated. For certain material that I knew well, I could recall the specific place on the page where I’d read a fact or quotation–upper right corner, middle of the page, just after a chapter heading, etc. These articles were photocopies or pdf printouts. That is, they were paper pages.

Turns out that the fixed layout of printed pages helps you absorb and learn information better. The context and landmarks on a printed page–headings, images, position on a spread–are one factor in cementing information in your mind. In contrast, the endless flow of text in most ebooks leaves readers in sea of words that is more difficult to fix in memory. Maia Szalavitz of TIME magazine talked to the researchers who have looked into the issue and reported back:

“What we found was that people on paper started to ‘know’ the material more quickly over the passage of time,” says [Kate] Garland [of the University of Leicester]. “It took longer and [required] more repeated testing to get into that knowing state [with the computer reading, but] eventually the people who did it on the computer caught up with the people who [were reading] on paper.”
 
Context and landmarks may actually be important to going from “remembering” to “knowing.” The more associations a particular memory can trigger, the more easily it tends to be recalled. Consequently, seemingly irrelevant factors like remembering whether you read something at the top or the bottom of page — or whether it was on the right or left hand side of a two-page spread or near a graphic — can help cement material in mind.

Obviously, I’m concerned about my own ability to retain what I read as more of what I read is in ebook format. But this further underscores my skepticism about the difficulty of teaching middle schoolers literacy skills like annotation in a digital context. It’s entirely possible that cross-platform annotation tools will solve this problem for ebooks in the near future. But for the moment, I’m going to remember what I read better–and the research suggests the same for my students–if I can mark up a paper version.

Image: Spread from Ellen Lupton’s “Thinking With Type”–sample pages available at elupton.com Bet you can remember where the iPhone was on the spread.

Between now and then, we’ll be reviewing material from our first units; activating knowledge from last spring, when my students were at a completely different school; and getting invested on showing our smarts. In the spirit of the (standardized testing) season, I’ve rounded up a few posts on great digital tools for building review lessons, investing students, and making management positive and data-driven.

1) I’m Gonna Review More Than You! – Socrative.com

Someone asked me a few days ago what I thought was the best app for instruction. A few months ago, I would have said Socrative, and I said the same thing this time around. Socrative is a web-based student response system that is excellent for formative assessments, exit tickets, and review games. It works on anything with an Internet connection and a browser. And the company is adding new features and performance enhancements all the time. Back in December, I posted about how I used the “Space Race” feature to let teams of students compete against each other in a review game. You can check out all the details on how that worked here:
The Socrative Method (for Capturing Student Responses on Any Web Device) (tfanet)
The Socrative Method (for Capturing Student Responses on Any Web Device) (appratt.com)

Socrative.com
(Notes: Since I last posted on Socrative, I’ve learned that you need to make sure all students “join” your virtual room before starting a space race, else the system will arbitrarily assign new students to a team. Seventh graders seem to find this frustrating… You can also use the “teacher-paced quiz” to keep some teams from racing ahead while you support others.)

2) You, Times Two (or More) – Show Me app

Sometimes the best way to review material is to allow students to re-absorb it at their own pace. That’s where an iPad screen casting app like Show Me can really shine.

In October, Nishi Kumar guest-blogged a stellar post on how she uses the app to record minilessons for her students the night before, then plays herself teaching on the LCD projector while she manages the classroom and supports students during direct instruction. You could do the same, or you could leave you iPad with a small group to review the minilesson together while you work somewhere else in the classroom. Have access to multiple computers, laptops, or tablets? Record 3 different minilessons and have the students who need help on each particular objective watch the one your data indicates they need. Viola! There are now 4 of you teaching simultaneously.

Show Me is also seeing a lot of growth and is constantly improving their platform. Here’s Nishi’s post:

Clone Yourself With the ShowMe iPad App (tfanet only)

Show Me

3) Take a Break and Read Something Good! – Digital books

Everyone needs more ebooks: you AND your students:

Getting eBooks Into iBooks (tfanet)
Getting eBooks Into iBooks (appratt.com)

A Brief Introduction to eBooks, and How to Read them in a Web Browser (or on a Smartphone or iPad) (tfanet)
A Brief Introduction to eBooks, and How to Read them in a Web Browser (or on a Smartphone or iPad) (appratt.com)

4) Brush Up Your Management With Cute Little Monsters – ClassDojo.com

Anytime of year is a good time to stay on task. ClassDojo can help you track student behavior in realtime. Drop in a roster, tweak you behaviors (or leave the standard set in place), pull it up on your projector, and just click as you narrate. It’s astonishing how quickly a room of middle schoolers can quiet down when they hear the Nintendo-like “boing” of a point getting awarded. There are lots of ways to use ClassDojo—my classes know that I reset everyone’s point totals daily and silent reading earns you between 0 and 4 points, a simple participation grade to start the class.

Take your iPad to the dojo. ClassDojo, that is. (tfanet)
Take your iPad to the dojo. ClassDojo, that is. (appratt.com)

ClassDojo.com

The reason that I hope that much of this post will be useless is that my fingers are crossed that Google will soon have a way to use most of the Google Docs features on a tablet interface. For the moment, Google Docs is not the right solution if you want students with iPads doing word processing. You know this if you’ve tried to use Google Docs on your iPad or a smartphone. Here’s what you get:

Google Docs on iOS. Click for full-size.

All the excitement of plain text without, well, any formatting tools. Snooze.

Our current unit is focused on informational texts, and the writing project focuses on writing a persuasive essay. (The full rubric for the assignment is here (pdf).)

In addition to writing a strong essay that effectively addresses opposing viewpoints, I want the final product to feel polished and published. But I also want it stored in Google Docs so it’s easy to turn into a webpage and easier still for me to read and type comments on. So while I’m not always a fan of app-based solutions (as opposed to web-based solutions) because they require lots of installation and debugging, this is one instance where I had to have an app to do what I thought best for my students.

There are several well-rated word processing/productivity apps for the iPad that will let you create and edit documents in standard Microsoft Office formats. Among them is Apple’s own Pages app, designed specifically for high-touch editing on iOS devices. I immediately ruled this out because it doesn’t integrate with any cloud service besides iCloud.

I don’t want to digress into a comparison of the various productivity apps, so I’ll just say that I use Quickoffice Pro HD. This may not even be the best option at the time of this writing, but it’s what I committed to in October, and any app with cloud service storage will let you do what I’m describing here. The $20 price tag made me flinch at first, but since I only had to buy it once and could then load it on all 29 iPads in my room, the features won me over. (All my iPads are synced to one Apple ID that I control and protect with a very strong password.) In addition to a simple writing interface and good looks, it integrates with a long list of cloud storage services, including popular ones like Dropbox and Google Docs. Here’s what editing in Quickoffice Pro HD looks like:

Editing in Quickoffice Pro HD. Click for full size.

When students create a new document and save it on their iPad, then can of course revisit that document when they come back the next day. But they need a way to submit the assignment for me to review when the project is done. Emailing the file from Quickoffice is not a good solution because it would require configuring yet another app, namely, Mail, with an email account. Moreover, submitting a document by email can sometimes happen prematurely—or attachments can get left off, or the wrong one attached, etc. You’ve made these mistakes yourself on a regular basis. Now multiply them by 100 7th-grade students.

Saving a document in Quickoffice Pro HD. Click for full size.

The other underlying issue here is that iOS doesn’t have a normal file system that allows you to upload files from the tablet to a website. If you could “attach” a word processing file created in Pages or Quickoffice to an assignment in Edmodo or Moodle, this whole discussion would be moot. But documents on an iOS device are more or less only accessible within certain apps, and iOS web browsers like Safari can’t open up a dialog box and let you navigate to the essay you just wrote and saved in another app.

Instead, I simply have my students upload their documents from their iPads to a shared Google Docs account from within Quickoffice. This means:

• their work is safely stored in the cloud
• they can return to it and make revisions if necessary
• I can open the documents in the fancier Google Docs web interface to review, score, and place typed comments directly on the assignment
• since I am the administrator of the Google account, I can move the files stored there around and change permissions if necessary to clean up the folders.

To aid organization, I simply have students save their work with their name as the filename. They then drag their work to a pre-synced Google Doc account and drop it in a folder named for their class period’s college.

File copied to Google Docs. Click for full size.

You should not link your personal Google account to student iPads, nor your school Google account if you have one. For our class, we have a complimentary Google Apps for Education suite, and I simply made a generic account, work@gholson7.org, with a simple password so that a small team of students can help me login into the account through Quickoffice on the iPads—no configuration necessary. You could of course just sign up for a new independent Google account (mrprattclasswork@gmail.com, for instance), or set up Dropbox as your cloud service and create a dedicated account for that.

I used a system similar to this in December for a personal narrative project and got good results. I’m hoping that this time around, we’ll be making even further strides as writers, thinkers, and digital publishers. It’s nowhere near perfect, but I want my students publishing, not just writing.

Questions on this system? Got another way you manage student digital work? Leave a comment or @appratt.

Tomorrow, February 1, is the first national “Digital Learning Day,” an event designed to expand recognition of technology in education and promote innovation. The concept is as sprawling as digital learning itself, but the idea is to set aside one day for “trying something new, showcasing success, kicking off project-based learning, or focusing on how digital tools can help improve student outcomes.” Also, there’s a 90-minute “Town Hall” with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski. Tune in at 1pm ET.

So what’s the big deal? You probably already use technology in your classroom. You have an LCD projector; you design lesson hooks with eye-catching YouTube videos; your students write programs on their graphing calculators; they build websites on their iPads. Or maybe you’re just experimenting with ClassDojo. The point is this: teaching requires technology, be it eBooks or paper books.

To close the achievement gap, we need more innovation and we need even better technology, so I’m excited about any celebration that moves more bits into more classrooms. But for students in low-income communities, getting access to those digital tools is especially critical in light of narrowing budgets across the country. Here’s S. Craig Watkins, a professor of sociology, African American studies and radio-television-film at the University of Texas at Austin, quoted on KQED’s Mind/Shift blog:

My concern is that as schools are now struggling with budget cuts, digital media and digital literacy is looked as a luxury as opposed to a necessity…I understand the enormous pressure that teachers and administrators are under, especially in the public school system. But we need to build a more compelling narrative that digital literacy is no longer a luxury but a necessity.

Journalist Tina Barseghian elaborates on Watkins’s point: “At-risk students need to be taught how to use these important tech tools beyond just texting and posting updates on Facebook.”

Math teachers have a responsibility to improve numeracy and English teachers a responsibility to cultivate literacy. But all teachers have a responsibility to promote technology literacy, and to be tech literate themselves. Why? Because education is a civil right. And as Vinton Cerf, one of the architects of the Internet, argued in a recent NYT column, “technology is an enabler of rights.”

Enough rhetoric. What I am doing tomorrow for Digital Learning Day? First, I’m betting that my school’s Internet access will be restored. Second, I’m planning a lesson that will introduce my students to responding to informational texts using a collaborative blog. And I’m going to keep digging through the wealth of math, science, social studies, and language arts resources offered on the Digital Learning Day site.

I’m always looking to move information from websites to my class iPads. The reason is simple: syncing 30 iPads one-to-one with my school MacBook is a pain, but putting material on a website allows for a one-to-many distribution channel. Fortunately, iOS offers a handy default connection between Safari and iBooks. If you point iOS Safari (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) at an ePub file sitting on a webserver, it will ask if you would like to open the file in iBooks. This means I can make eBooks available on our class Moodle site and allow students to browse and download them individually at their own discretion—no syncing required.

There are lots of ways to do this, but the essential elements are:

1. upload the ePub files to a web site
2. create links on a web page that point to the files
3. make these links accessible to your audience

For a few weeks, I’ve been doing this with an ugly setup that involved showing book information and links in a Google Doc spreadsheet:

But today I decided it was time to clean up and get professional. So that meant moving our private digital class library into Moodle.

Moodle includes a helpful module for making databases with a simple wizard interface. I said that each entry in the database needed to have these fields:

1. Title
2. Cover image
3. Open in iBooks [a URL link to the book file]
4. Author
5. Genre
6. Summary

Here’s what that looks like for Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother

The summary info and cover image I pulled from goodreads.com, the phenomenal social networking site for sharing book recommendations.

Now that I’ve got a more streamlined system, I’ll need to keep growing the library and tracking to see what books my scholars are reading.

I knew that we weren’t supposed to use our own computers and networking equipment on school wires, but I didn’t understand the technical reason why. And I’d just set up a class set of iPads for my students that were going to prove pretty useless if I didn’t have WiFi for them.

Shamed, I hustled upstairs and unhooked the contraband wireless router. Internet access was restored through out the building shortly thereafter.

The next morning rolled around, and I still had 29 iPads what weren’t very useful without WiFi. So I cracked open my school-issued MacBook Pro and flipped on Internet Sharing in System Preferences. The essentially turns your MacBook, plugged into an ethernet port, into a wireless hotspot.

Two hours later, I started noticing that my network connection was sluggish. Then our technology coordinator knocked on my door, displeased. She asked about a wireless network that shared a name with my MacBook. This time I was too embarrassed to completely own up to the crime and quickly shut off the sharing function. But the damage had been done. Internet access was down for the whole school, not 24 hours after the first incident.

But because our middle school shares a building with an elementary school, access to the entire site was down. Apparently, central IT rules stipulate that when the system spots unauthorized networking equipment sharing net access in a school, the connection gets cut to the entire physical location. Which meant that for the second day in a row, I had brought down two school networks at the same time.

The upshot: I got an authorized wireless router later that day.

I also learned a few lessons about how (and how not) to push school tech adoption forward:

Ask about protocol.
Internet access is a shared resource, so if you’re going to use it in ways that are new or unexpected, be diplomatic. I should have asked more questions before I went rogue with my self-styled WiFi setup. It would have prevented a lot of disrupted work and instruction.

Think about bandwidth.
Bandwidth is a measure of how much data you’re pushing through the wires on a given network. All networks have a limit to how much data they can handle—think of it like the amount of water you can squeeze through a pipe of a certain diameter in a given amount of time. Bigger pipes = more data. But even mundane-seeming tasks can gobble up huge amounts of network bandwidth. Stream an entire HD movie into your classroom over Netflix and you’re talking about 3.5 GB of data—basically an entire DVD or half your free Gmail storage. If you’re consistently using a lot of bandwidth for just your classroom, that limits what everyone at your school has to play with.

Reflect: Is what you’re trying to do centered on student learning?
I was excited to get my iPads up and running. But I also had to stop and and ask myself if what I was doing was about helping them learn or just running nifty technology tricks. Ultimately, I’m glad that I pushed the rules because it meant that my students got access to eBooks, a class website, and online assessment materials within the first weeks of the year. However, I risked future support for projects like this by skirting the rules. The trust and support I’d earned from my principals was critical to continuing my experiments.

Image: flickr/artform