I recently attended the Cincinnati Country Day School (CCDS) Tablet conference. The conference provides a fantastic learning opportunity if you are at a 1:1 mobile device school or want to shift your school to a more constructivist, student-empowered learning model. Hosted by Robert Baker and Greg Martin, the conference was full on with very practical lessons and opportunities to see the technology being used in classes.

Here are some highlights:

• The tablet is a powerful creativity tool that allows for more risk-taking due to the ability to ink and erase. Inking opens the door for collaboration.
• OneNote not only offers an excellent organizational tool for information gathering and recording, but it also can be a tool for communication if the students can sync their notebooks with their teachers. This is the case at CCDS, where they wrote a program that has each student’s OneNote notebook automatically sync with the version their teachers also have. Much like using Google Docs, the teacher and student can constantly communicate, share comments, edit work, and publish final products with no time wasted handing in papers.
• Inking enables a great deal of scaffolding and individualization as teachers build templates for learning activities and then provide a formative assessment with further commenting via sharing OneNote and the power of inking.
• With its microphone and camera, the tablet offers students many ways to record information and build out OneNote pages with handwritten and keyboarded text, images, video, and sound files. The inking allows students the annotation tool to make connections, reflect, and make sense of their learning using their preferred modality.
• Many students and teachers use Audacity to embed oral comments into OneNote to move beyond text.
• Many teachers use Dyknow for its interactivity in sharing student responses during class. It also provides a public factor to student engagement in class as the teacher can bring student work from their tablets to the projector screen. We saw Dyknow being used primarily for problem-solving in math class, but it was also used in other disciplines.
• Moodle is their Virtual Learning Environment provider.
• Jeremiah McCall, a history teacher at CCDS, provided much information about gaming and learning. His website, Gaming the Past, is an excellent place to learn more. A few others are Games for Change and Educational Simulations.

There were many other takeaways that I could list, but the opportunity to attend the conference and experience such a shifted school is what one should take away from reading this post. Contact Robert and register for one of the conferences CCDS offers throughout the year.

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