Culled from the responses of 694 randomly selected educators, including librarians, teachers, and principals, the study compares findings with those from a similar survey conducted in 2009.

According to the report, “2012 Survey of K-12 educators on Social Networking, Online Communities, and Web 2.0 Tools,” 82 percent of all K-12 educators now use social networking for personal and professional use, up from 61 percent in 2009.

The study provides information about educators’ favorite sites by category and reveals social networking patterns by age and frequency of use. It also reveals educators’ concerns about privacy and provides information about school district technology access policies for students and teachers.

Facebook, Edmodo, and the Discovery Education Network most popular in their categories

Facebook is the most used social networking venue among respondents, with 85 percent using the site, the same percentage as in 2009.

LinkedIn is the second most popular, accessed by 41 percent of respondents, up from 14 percent in 2009. Twitter is third, at 39 percent, followed by Google+ (27percent), Ning (11percent), and MySpace (20 percent).

Younger educators network the most, with 97 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds networking online, as opposed to 75 percent of respondents who are 55-plus, according to the report.

Among education-focused sites, Edmodo has the most members, accessed by 27 percent of respondents, followed by edWeb.net (15 percent), ASCD EDge (9 percent), Classroom 2.0 (9 percent), We are Teachers (6 percent), Teacher 2.0 (5 percent), NSTA Learning Center (4 percent), and Educators PLN (3 percent).

Librarians use the first four of these education-focused sites more than teachers or principals, according to the study. Looking forward, 31 percent of librarians say that they will likely join a new networking and PD site in the next year, as opposed to 22 percent of teachers and 31 percent of principals.

For librarians, the top five branded online communities are the Discovery Education Network (49 percent), Edutopia (31 percent), PBS Teachers (30 percent), Thinkfinity (25 percent), and BrainPOP Educators  (24 percent).

Webinars are the most popular networking tool among educators, while document sharing is the most used in classrooms.

Concern over privacy and restrictive school policies

Forty five percent of respondents express concern about privacy on education sites, while 26 percent worry about inappropriate relationships with students. Twenty six percent are concerned that affiliation with a social network “might head to an incident that would jeopardize my job,” according to the report. Among those surveyed, 80 percent keep their personal and professional accounts separate most of the time.

Twenty-three percent believe that their school or district’s policy on Web 2.0 tools is restrictive to teachers, and 47 percent think their schools’ regulations are a hindrance to students.

Fifty four percent of respondents work in districts that allow kids to bring their own devices to school, but only five percent of those schools allow students to use them with no restrictions. 64 percent of educators think it likely that their districts will “open up policies on BYOD in the future.”

“There is growing awareness that online communities help teachers create an extended personal learning network and access a wealth of professional development resources—often at no cost to the teacher,” a press release connected to the report states.

The press release adds that the U. S. Department of Education has encouraged educators to access online resources by declaring August 2012 “Connected Educator Month,” along with initiatives including the 2010 National Education Technology Plan and the Connected Online Communities of Practice Project (COCP).

Technology isn’t supposed to turn us into idiots—it’s supposed to make us smarter. And yet, these days the phrase “technology addiction” is cropping up all over the place. A University of Maryland 2011 study found that the majority of the 1,000 students who were interviewed admitted that they were unable to abstain from using technology for an entire day. The students I work with seem to have developed nervous tics, constantly flipping out their cell phones to check on texts, messages, or the time.

Rather than bemoaning our fate as teachers battling this new disease, we need to embrace it. If you can’t keep your students from checking their cell phones 50 times each class period, make your students’ devices work to your purpose. A smorgasbord of tools are available to help you do just that. Use Poll Everywhere to quiz your students. You create the questions and your students text their responses using laptops, tablets, or mobile phones. Display the website with your Smartboard or projector and watch the responses roll in, changing the graph on the screen as each student responds. Students can also text comments and questions. This is a free application for up to 40 responders. PollDaddy is a similar tool that provides live web polling and can be embedded in web pages and blogs. Socrative is another polling tool that also runs on laptops, tablets, and smartphones and allows you to take a quick poll of your students through true-or-false, multiple-choice, or short-answer questions.  Socrative also includes exit tickets, a quick way to gage students’ understanding of the day’s lesson; quizzes that are graded for you; and the game Space Race, in which teams of students answer questions as fast as they can to move their rocket across the screen to victory.

Create a class Twitter account and encourage (or require) kids to tweet notes, comments, and questions on various topics that they’re studying. Use Twtpoll,a tool that allows you to launch polls directly from your Twitter account. The class account can serve as a note-taking tool. Assign a different student each day to be the class tweeter and encourage all your students to tweet their comments and questions during class and later when they’re doing homework and need help.

Right before class starts, send out a group text with Remind101 that explains the day’s objective. Remind101 is also a great tool for keeping in touch with students after school hours. Need to extend a deadline?  Text them. Want to remind kids to bring in certain supplies? Text them.

Technology can be an addictive hindrance to education, or it can enhance and expand the ways we communicate with and engage our students. Mobile devices are here to stay. Make them work for you.

Librarian Carolyn Foote with some of her students. Photograph by Michael Thad Carter

Walk into our school library and you’re bound to see scores of iPads propped up on the tables. Our students at Westlake High, a large suburban school on the outskirts of Austin, TX, are using them to read ebooks, download assignments, edit videos, write blog posts, and to do much more. Since we rolled out our 1:1 iPad program a year ago, more than 4,100 teachers and students, including eighth graders at the nearby middle school and even some of our elementary school classes, have taken advantage of these devices. In fact, they’ve become as much a part of students’ everyday lives as their notebooks, backpacks, and textbooks.

Our students aren’t the only ones who’ve gotten into the iPad act. Our AP environmental science teacher has had his students take iPads along on field trips so they can use free apps, such as LeafSnap and iBirds, to chart their surroundings. Our computer science teacher showed his class how to create their own apps, and our American Sign Language class uses the iPad’s camera to Skype with their peers at the Texas School for the Deaf. And to cut down on the amount of paper we consume, our English, math, and science teachers post their assignments as PDFs, which their students can view on their iPads, instead of printing them. That simple decision has already saved our campus more than $30,000 in printing costs during the past year.

How’d we get to this point? It all began in the fall of 2010 with a modest pilot program in our library and just six iPads.

Why iPads? I’m a gadget head and a librarian, and when I first used one, I sensed that they had great potential for learning and that they could revolutionize our students’ access to information—and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on one again.

We started small, purchasing the tablets with money that we’d raised. And since our administrators were eager to see how the devices could be used to promote learning in the library and in the classroom, I set up a pilot program to gather data, using Google Forms to create a series of surveys and questionnaires for our teachers to chart the effectiveness of using iPads with their students. I also encouraged my teaching colleagues to take the devices home on weekends and try them in their classrooms during the school week. And I helped them plan how to use the iPad’s preloaded apps in their lessons. As it turned out, our teachers’ responses to these devices were unanimously positive. Beyond liking the obvious conveniences of the device’s mobility and apps, one of our teachers remarked that “an iPad levels the playing field for all of my students—from special ed to general ed to gifted.”

We also included a wide range of students in our pilot program, and gathered information on the ease of accessing databases and using the devices to read various texts. As you might imagine—especially two years ago, when the iPad was first released—our kids were thrilled to use them. One student (with an eye to the future?) even pointed out that the devices might ultimately save space in the library. And it was especially gratifying to see our most physically challenged students adeptly using the tablets to gain access to all sorts of things that had previously been inaccessible to them.

We also read about how other schools had successfully used iPads. (Palm Beach County School’s iPad wiki was one of the first to document the use of iPads in its schools and in others.) Armed with these observations, our survey data, comments from teachers and students, and photos of our students and staff using the devices (and a video of a one-year-old turning an iPad on and off that I just couldn’t resist!), I presented the findings to our principal, Linda Rawlings, and to our district’s curriculum and tech directors. They were so enthusiastic about our pilot program that we ultimately sent a district team to Apple’s headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, to learn more about 1:1 iPad programs in schools, and we soon decided to expand our own program as a way to help students prepare for the ubiquitous devices they’d encounter in college.

Ready, set, swipe

To apply for the new program, teachers were asked to describe how they planned to use the iPads in their classrooms. After our principal reviewed their applications, she chose 40 teachers to be part of the official WIFI (Westlake Initiative for Innovation) pilot program, which also included 1,600 juniors and seniors—all of whom would be issued iPads, along with the rest of our teachers.

Since I was familiar with our school’s overall curriculum, our campus technology coordinator and I investigated apps that would be useful in a variety of subject areas. We searched for note-taking apps (such as AudioNote, Sundry Note, and Penultimate), PDF annotation apps (like Neu.annotate), audio-recording apps (Bluefire), apps for special education students (Dragon Dictation and Tap to Talk), and many more. Along with those that our teachers recommended, we created a list of apps to include on our iPads (for more details about the program, visit our blog at www.eaneswifi.blogspot.com, which I created with our district technology director to document the process). Many of the apps were free, and we also went through Apple’s Volume Purchasing Program, a special plan for schools that reduces the cost of apps by 50 percent, to buy the rest. We primarily used state technology funds to purchase our apps, and bond money allocated for technology to pay for our iPads. And JAMF Software’s Casper Suite gave our information services (IT) department the ability to manage the iPad inventory, tracking, etc., which made it possible to retrieve devices that our students had misplaced.

During the summer, our teachers could pick up their iPads early if they attended a brief introductory training session; our juniors and seniors had to wait until the third day of the new school year to receive theirs. You should have seen their faces when we handed them their iPads, and their enthusiasm was contagious. The library was absolutely buzzing as they explored the apps, started using them on assignments, and got creative with the cameras. Suddenly these students weren’t being told to put away their devices—they were actually being encouraged to use them in the library and in class for learning, creating projects, and organizing their lives.

It’s a major challenge for teachers to move from a classroom with no electronic devices (other than those on a library laptop cart) to an environment in which mobile devices are constantly available. And as more and more teachers dropped by the library, it became obvious that they needed our support to navigate the new devices. Thanks to our previous experience with iPads, the library staff was able to assist teachers with technical help and curriculum support from the get-go.

Café society

Since the library is centrally located in our school, we offered up space in our “café” area to house the help desk, which, after a contest to name it, we dubbed the “Juice Bar” (as in a place to get powered up and also for creative juices). We removed unused bookcases, installed USB power strips, and added window-side café tables, comfy seat cushions, and catchy Juice Bar signs. We also added district-built mini Plexiglas boards where students could post messages and recommendations. The revamped space is perfect for the tech-support staff to help students; after-school “Appy Hours,” led by our district technology coordinator; and individual planning sessions with teachers.

To help teachers expand their iPad repertoires, I brought in consultant Dean Shareski for a daylong workshop on incorporating photography apps into lessons. His biggest impact? Showing teachers that it’s not really about “the app”—it’s about using these applications to enhance a well-thought-out, purposeful lesson.

Now that the help desk is located in the library, my library assistants and I have became busy troubleshooters—doing everything from giving out passwords to showing kids how to edit an iMovie or offering a quick tutorial on using the WebDav app to access their home folders on our Novell network. At lunchtime, the desk is staffed by members of our IT staff and student mentors, who have also been a huge help.

How has this technology affected our campus? One of the biggest changes I’ve noticed is that there’s a stronger spirit of collaboration as we all learn how to use apps to support our instructional goals. Teachers are constantly helping other teachers; as the librarian, I’m helping the technology team; students help their peers and their teachers. For instance, the tech crew, library staff, and teachers have all pitched in to lead our lunchtime workshops, including an AP environmental science teacher who offered to teach Flubaroo, a script for Google Forms that self-grades tests.

Now that we have iPads, I’ve also had to grapple with providing our kids with ebooks that’ll work effectively on their devices. To make sure I’m up to speed in this area, I’ve made a concerted effort to attend webinars and conference sessions, read articles, and test ebook products. Although I know things are constantly changing, we currently offer ebooks through Overdrive, Follett Shelf, and Gale Virtual Reference Library. And we’re also considering using Mackin Via, Baker and Taylor’s Axis 360, and BrainHive (full disclosure: I’m an advisor on this product), among others. There are a lot of informed decisions that need to be made regarding ebooks, but they all begin with understanding the purpose for which you plan to use the materials.

With our students having iPads, QR codes have become a handy way to get ebook information, surveys, and other necessary messages to them. Using apps such as QR Code Reader or Scan, students can scan QR codes posted in the library to access our database lists, ebook apps, or book reviews. Since we started using QR codes in the library, they’ve really caught on: our student council posts them in the hallways to spread the word about blood drives, teachers post them beside their doorways with links to their websites and homework pages, and more. (A quick tip: after a student replicated one of our QR code signs, but changed the code to go to an inappropriate site, I now include a handwritten symbol on the corner of each sign so I know it’s legit!)

How are students using their iPads for research and projects? Our English AP students used Pages to storyboard a research project they were doing in the library. Our sophomore English students used photo apps to create a “one word, one image” depiction of a character from a novel. Geography classes use the Zapd app for blogging projects. Our French students filmed skits, as did our Latin students; and ASL students use the iPad’s camera for recording responses to quizzes, Skyping with classes at other schools, and practicing their signing. Our English classes use ebooks for their reading time, and free classic ebooks from Project Gutenberg for classroom annotations of novels they’re studying, using apps such as neu.annotate or GoodReader that allow them to write on PDF files. I recently met with our sophomore English teachers who are planning to use the Pulse app to help students create a personalized RSS “reader” of articles they’re passionate about for a new blog project. Our special education students are using apps like ProLoQuo and Tap to Talk to communicate more easily. And in the library, we use the Easybib app; Google’s app (which has built-in voice-and-visual search functions); Overdrive and Follett Shelf apps; database apps, such as Gale Access My Library, and many more, like the brand-new Haiku Desk for presentations.

How have our students responded to the 1:1 iPad rollout? Well, based on a survey conducted at the end of the first year, 76 percent of those surveyed felt that iPads had improved their educational experience and only 18 percent indicated that they had not improved their motivation in the classroom. Eighty-two percent claimed that iPads had a “somewhat positive” or “positive” impact on “their desire to dig deeper.” As one student commented, “We have been assigned more creative, interactive assignments such as making movies using the iPad and sending emails to continue and reflect on discussions held in class.”

Frankly, with all of this stuff going on, I began to wonder: Would our iPad-toting kids still want to use our library computers or have an opportunity to access our resources? In order to be sure our students had instant, one-touch access to the library, I visited their classrooms and helped them create library folders on their iPads containing all the pertinent library-related apps—hoping to instill the idea that the library is available 24/7. By the way, I needn’t have worried: students are still using our library computers. In fact, one of my favorite photographs that I took last year is of a student sitting at one of our computers, surrounded by an open book, her notes, a graphing calculator, and her iPad—and she’s using all of them!

Obviously, with this many mobile devices on campus and with our plan to distribute iPads to our ninth- and tenth-grade students this year, we’ll need to offer even more online tutorials, screencasts, and instructions. This past summer, I helped cochair iPadpalooza, an all-day, all-iPad conference at our campus, the brainchild of Carl Hooker, our director of instructional technology, where our teachers could attend workshops by presenters from around the state and country on all things iPad.

As we move into the schoolwide phase of our 1:1 iPad program this fall and our teachers become more reliant on their tablets, it’ll be even more important for us to provide both online and in-person information literacy instruction and copyright and curricular support. I used to roll out a lot of information on my webpage, which was the first site kids saw when they logged onto the library computers. But now that students have their own devices, I’m having to rethink our rollout strategy. This is where QR codes posted in the library can be helpful—directing students to new tutorials, updates on my website, etc.

Photograph by Bob Murphy

Life with iPads

What have I learned from our ambitious new program? For starters, it really does take a village to implement a 1:1 technology program—and the librarian has an important part to play in that community. We bring leadership and organizational skills, experimentation, knowledge of social media, and observational and communication skills to the table that help make it successful. We also see the students each day and are able to provide powerful input on their needs. We understand the curricular needs of our campuses, since we work across so many departments and grade levels. Support for teachers is critical to a successful 1:1 implementation and as a librarian, I feel this is one of my core missions. Understanding and relaying the needs of teachers to other departments dealing with iPads is an important role librarians can play. As Hooker, the director of instructional technology, says, “While our district is lucky enough to have an educational technologist on every campus, without librarians, this project would stall and students would get frustrated. They are the conduit to the ed-tech department as well as being a ‘just in time’ trainer.”

I agree. But we can’t wait around for others to ask us to be a part of the process. We need to be proactive in educating ourselves, offering our services, and creating lists of resources, because that’s what we do. Our jobs as media specialists require us to evolve, learn, stay current, and look for opportunities to help our student learners.

Last week, after we issued our latest batch of iPads, I watched two students in the library, sitting across the table from one another, Facetiming each other and laughing. I watched kids sitting in our armchairs reading on their iPads, and a student on our library patio using hers to study. Moments like these remind me that it isn’t really about the device. It is, as always, about facilitating access to information, helping kids learn, and empowering them. That’s why librarians are so indispensable.

Carolyn Foote is a “technolibrarian” at Westlake High School in Austin, TX, and has written a chapter about her school’s iPad program for the upcoming book New Landscapes in Mobile Learning (Routledge, May 2013). Foote will discuss her program at the October 17 virtual event The Digital Shift: Libraries, Ebooks and Beyond.

Illustration by Travis Jonker; Photography by Craig van der Lende.

Last year, we rolled out an ereader lending program in my fifth and sixth grade school library, and I plan to share here the ups, downs, and what-to-look-out-fors we encountered along the way. We’ll talk planning and implementation of the program—but first, a bit of background. Let’s hop into the librarian time machine (fashioned from an old card catalog I found on Etsy) and go back to August 2011….

Background

Each year, my school district offers an Innovation Grant to employees. Teachers interested in implementing a project, using unique or innovative components and with the goal of benefiting students, are encouraged to apply. For my secondary school colleague Amy Huyck and me, an ereader lending program was a no-brainer. Our reasons were these:

• It would allow all students access to this fast-growing form of technology, especially those who would not otherwise have access due to socioeconomic status.

• It would generate excitement for reading. A bit of hype never hurt, right?

• Ereader features (adjustable fonts, highlighting, note-taking) would benefit all students, and particularly those with visual impairments.

• Other schools were seeing positive reactions to their ereader programs.

We outlined these benefits in our program goals, put together a time line for reaching them, and sent the whole thing to the powers that be.

If this were a cooking show, this is where I’d put the grant application in the oven and pull out another application with the word APPROVED written on top. That was an exciting email to receive. Now might be a good time to mention that if you’re an educator looking for grant opportunities, FableVision has a nice list you can subscribe to for free.

The grant allowed us to purchase 10 ereaders, warranties, cases, and a selection of ebooks to spread among our fifth and sixth grade and middle and high school. I would have three devices under my watch. While this isn’t a huge number, it gave us the chance to get a handle on things before expanding the program.

Planning

Let’s move on to a headline: “Ownership of E-Readers, Tablets Almost Doubles in One Month.” Last holiday season, in the span of 30 days, we went from 10 percent of the population to 19 percent of the population owning some form of ereader. The digital reading explosion is staggering to consider. If the whole “ebooks eliminate cover shame” thing is true, the time to get into the trashy romance novel biz is now.

OK, so you’re feeling like you’re ready. You want to start offering ereaders to students. First, some things to think about.

Research

• Georgia school librarian Buffy Hamilton has been sharing her valuable ereader program insights on her blog: Here and here.

• ALA Techsource posted the slides from an excellent webinar on ebooks in K–12 libraries (hosted by the aforementioned Buffy Hamilton)

• School Library Journal published Audrey Watters’s article titled “The Truth About Tablets.” For my money, it’s a must-read on the topic.

• No Shelf Required 2 (edited by Sue Polanka, ALA Editions) is also an excellent way to learn more.

Grade levels

Before beginning an ereader program, you should ask yourself which grade levels the program is for. I work in a district where grades are grouped by building, so I have a K–2, a 3–4, and a 5–6 school. Considering the limitations of the device, the cost, and the intended use, it seemed like beginning with fifth and sixth graders was the place to start, along with middle school and high school students.

Cost

When looking at a program dependent on electronic devices, dollars and cents immediately come into play. If no grant opportunities are working out and your library budget is tight, write up a proposal and submit it to your administration. Those looking to stay current may be willing to fund your program.

The beauty is, the prices of standard ereaders are coming down so quickly, cost is fast becoming a nonissue. Folks are already wondering if the Kindle will be free in the near future. For a while, Nook was free with the purchase of a digital subscription to the New York Times.

Basically, the day is fast approaching when you’ll be getting ereaders as junk mail. “Not another ereader!” you’ll moan. A national Do Not Send Me an Ereader list will be created to fight off being bombarded by ereader-device spam in your mailbox.

But however you ante up the funds, don’t forget to factor in the following costs when budgeting:

Permission

We require a permission slip signed by a parent or guardian before checkout (email me for a copy of the one we use). From a school district standpoint, this is especially important if the device has Internet access (folks tend to get very permission-y when the Internet is involved). We’re circulating Nook Simple Touch ereaders, which don’t have an advertised web browser, diminishing this issue. Work with your school district technology director to see what’s acceptable. Permission slips can turn into legal jargon in a hurry, though, so push for clarity and brevity.

Accessibility

Before they started circulating, we made sure to turn on password protection for downloads. Each device is tied to a credit card, which makes it easy for an individual to order books but could be a problem when offering them for general checkout.

Once the ereader is checked out, where are students allowed to take them? Some options:

Teachers

Aside from individual students checking them out, another possibility is to load up some books for use in classrooms for literature circles. It’s likely if you did this you’d want to get enough to outfit a whole classroom. If one or two groups have ereaders and other groups do not, there could be mutiny.

But, which device to choose? (See “The Devices,” below)

Ebooks

So, with planning complete and the device chosen, now comes possibly the most important piece—what books to offer and how to get them on the devices?

For me, the trickiest part of the program is in the management of ebooks. If there’s one thing that would open up more libraries to lend ereaders, it would be a way to manage any number of devices from one account. Frustratingly, that’s not the current reality.

To manage devices individually, you need a separate account—with a unique email address—for each one. Should librarians really have to create shell email accounts just to offer Kindles or Nooks to eager students? The alternative—which we went with due to lack of a better solution—is one account for up to six ereaders, sharing books across all devices. Barnes & Noble does offer a “managed digital locker” program, but you need to purchase 25 or more devices to qualify and then have to work through B&N to manage the ebooks. Not ideal.

If appointed Ereader Czar, my first actions would be to eliminate Digital Rights Management (DRM) that blocks ebooks from working across platforms, and then demand that ereader makers offer the ability for users to manage all their devices from a single account.

Adding to the complexity are traditional book jobbers and publishers offering their own ereader platforms. Follett has Follett Shelf, Baker & Taylor has Axis360, and Mackin has VIA. All of these offer on-demand access to ebooks for iPads and other tablet computer-style ereaders. OverDrive, the popular public library ebook provider, also offers a school library solution—for a princely sum. My school district will be kicking off a 1:1 initiative this year at the middle school and high school level using iPads, and we are experimenting with Follett Shelf. It will be interesting to see how this affects the circulation of our traditional ereaders.

Looking at traditional ereaders like those we have, you can go a couple of ways with how you offer ebooks.

Something else to consider is giving students the ability to check out books from the public library on the device. This is an excellent way to strengthen the partnership between school and public libraries while also giving students more freedom in what they choose to read.

Whichever option you choose, one thing we realized early on is that we wouldn’t be able to track individual ebook checkouts on our Nooks— there just isn’t a good way to do it. Our approach is to catalog the device and not worry about which titles are being read. The ebook platforms I mentioned earlier (Follett Shelf, et al) do allow for ebook checkout data—another aspect to consider when creating your program.

In the wild

This is the best part—sending the ereaders out into the world. As permission slips came back and the wait list grew, it became clear that we needed more devices, so I added two, bringing our total to a larger yet still modest five ereaders. Be sure you don’t forget the hype. We set up a display in the library announcing the new program. I got on our school’s daily video newscast for our school and let students know how to sign up. We offered a stack of permission slips front and center, alongside a page showing the covers of all the books they would have access to.

It had to happen. About three weeks in, we had our first damage—the power port at the bottom of one ereader was broken, making it impossible to charge. With the protection plan, this was not a problem. I brought it to the nearest Barnes & Noble, explained what had happened, and left the store 10 minutes later with a replacement. It’s a beautiful thing when you expect a hassle and you are met with nothing but smooth sailing.

One trend we noticed was that the ereaders were in much higher demand in my fifth- and sixth-grade school than they were at the middle school or high school. We noticed that older students often already had ereaders.

After the first round of checkouts, we received some questions about how the things worked. We decided to create a simple, one-page how-to for students checking out ereaders. This helped to address student FAQs immediately.

We made the executive decision to not circulate power plugs. With a one-week checkout, battery life has held up—and in cases where it didn’t, students could bring the device to the library for a couple of hours during the school day to top it off. Just be sure to do a full recharge before sending the device out again.

Looking back on the year, I know a couple of things. I know the goals we outlined in our grant application—providing access, generating excitement, and offering a more customizable reading experience—were all met. I know we encountered more difficult decisions than anticipated. I also know we’ll be looking to expand to lower grade levels this coming school year. A modest beginning is still a beginning. I’m glad we started.

This article, modified from a series of posts on Travis Jonker’s blog 100 Scope Notes is just a glimpse of the smart thinking Jonker shares there. We’re pleased to announce that Jonker and 100 Scope Notes will be joining SLJ’s blog network, which includes A Fuse #8 Production by Elizabeth Bird and Joyce Valenza’s NeverEndindSearch. Coming soon!

Vialogues home page

As a social studies teacher, I’ve always liked using documentary videos and news clips in my classroom. It’s a challenge, however, to give students the time they need to discuss what they’re seeing. I’ve tried having them jot down their responses and questions. But the pen-and-paper method lacks a mechanism for immediate feedback. I’ve also stopped the video to discuss it, but that disrupts the viewing experience. The last couple of years, I’ve turned to online backchannels or chat rooms in which my students can post their comments and questions in real time. That way, I can respond immediately to their questions—such as “who is that person?”—and interject my own comments.

SynchTube was the first real-time video discussion platform that I tried and three years later, it’s still a solid platform. A free service for watching videos and chatting about them simultaneously, SynchTube was initially only compatible with YouTube clips. But now it also supports Blip.tv, Vimeo, and a half dozen other video-sharing sites. To use SynchTube, find the URL of your desired clip, copy that URL into SynchTube, and start chatting with your students while they’re watching the video.

If you’re working with students who are 13 or older, Google+ Hangouts now offers the option to watch a YouTube video during a live hangout session. Hangouts provide the tools to browse for and watch clips and chat about them in real time. Keep in mind, however, that hangouts are limited to 10 participants. Based on my experience, I’d recommend turning off your webcam while in a session and use the text or voice chat instead.

Watch2gether is a service much like SynchTube, and it’s super simple to use. To get started, enter a nickname for yourself (it could be your first name), then search for a video or enter a URL for one that you’ve previously bookmarked. When you’ve found the video you want, a chat column will appear on the right side of your browser. You can invite others to chat by sending them the URL assigned to your session. One limitation to Watch2gether: it only works for YouTube clips.

The tools covered thus far are limited to videos that are hosted somewhere online. But you may have clips saved on your local hard drive that you want to share and discuss. Or perhaps your students just wrapped up a video production of their own and you’re ready to discuss the project as a group. If either scenario applies, take a look at Vialogues.

Another site for hosting conversation around videos, Vialogues gives users the option to upload a video as the centerpiece of their discussion or choose from the offerings on YouTube. After you’ve selected a video from that service or uploaded one of your own, you can post questions in the form of a poll and add comments, which I’ve done to highlight various points made in the video. Vialogues can be made public or private. Choosing the private option means that only people you approve can watch and comment on the video. If you choose to make a Vialogue public, it can be embedded into your blog or website.

TED-Ed got a lot of publicity earlier this year for its flipped-video lessons, which can be found on or created via the site. TED-Ed isn’t a platform for real-time discussion—it’s a place where teachers can post questions and students can respond to them. Perhaps in the future, it’ll also have a real-time option.

Until then, if you want to provide a place for students to post reactions and questions in the moment, try any of the aforementioned options.

Without the killer apps that enable me to work more efficiently, the iPad would simply be a rather pricey game and ereading device. So which ones are my mainstays?

A quick glance at my first screen of apps provides a pretty clear indication of how I use my iPad. Up front are Keynote and Pages (both $9.99), Apple’s presentation and word processing/desktop publishing apps. The incredibly powerful mobile version of Keynote is one of the main reasons I can now travel without a laptop. It’s a snap to add slides, make changes, and present directly from my iPad. The Keynote Remote app for iPhone and iPod Touch that turns the smaller devices into presenter tools via WiFi or Bluetooth are quite helpful, too. With Keynote and Pages, I can interact seamlessly with Microsoft Office applications, including PowerPoint and Word.

Perhaps my favorite app is Daedalus (The Soulmen, $4.99). A relatively new release, it’s become my text editor of choice. Beautiful design, a classic font (Goudy Bookletter), and flexibility through multiple-page documents makes Daedulus a joy to use. Like other writing apps, it provides a keyboard extension bar with direct access to a tab button and frequently used punctuation marks. That plus a subtle word count display make it perfect for professional writing tasks. This app, and not Pages, is where I do my real writing. The simple, clean design and limited options could also help students stay focused on the job at hand.

For more casual note taking, I still turn to one of the original handwriting notebook apps, Penultimate (Cocoa Box, $.99). This app was recently acquired by Evernote, another great tool, but one that I just can’t seem to get into using. With multiple notebooks and various features to make iPad scribbling easier, such as wrist protection and speed-variable line thickness, Penultimate lives up to its ranking as one of the highest-rated apps in the category.

A couple of utilities have also earned a permanent spot on my home screen even if I don’t use them every day. Although there isn’t a SMART Board app for the iPad, you can achieve similar results using a remote desktop app like Splashtop ($4.99) to take control of the computer connected to your digital whiteboard via WiFi. Students can still use the whiteboard, but the app enables you to make notes, handle menus, or other tasks on the fly via an iPad. It’s on my tablet for those lazy moments when I’m upstairs, but need to access a file on my desktop downstairs. I remote in, send the file to Dropbox, and keep working without disrupting the cats draped over my legs.

Finally, there’s Dropbox (Dropbox, free). So much more than simply cloud storage, Dropbox keeps files synchronized between my home and work computers and my iPad and iPhone so that I don’t have to worry about working on the latest version of a presentation. And I can easily share files with others.

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