iTeach, Therefore I Am

Several years ago I attended the California Association of Independent Schools (CAIS) Northern California Regional meeting. I attended a session on teaching animation in primary and middle schools with Barbara Cohen who, at the time, was Director of Technology with the Marin Country Day School.

Barbara Cohen

Barbara began her workshop with introductions and went out of her way to explain to all the other people in the room that she'd known me for a very long time. She added that I had taught her everything she knew about teaching video production with students.

I was a bit embarrassed about this introduction to the group. After all, the work I did with Barbara was at least 10 or 12 years earlier. We worked together on a project I created that taught students video production with VHS camcorders and linear video editing equipment. That process became obsolete long ago.

It occurs to me now that Barbara was really saying I had taught her an important lesson about the power of teaching with multimedia in the classroom. More specifically, I had taught her the value of engaging students in media production in the classroom.

Student video producers circa 1994

Classroom media production projects create an environment that promotes a deepening of student understanding of the content in their classes. Student media projects are also an integral part of student assessment in the modern classroom -- especially in 1:1 schools.

However, today students make their own videos on tablets and cell phones, and publish it for the world to see -- without the help (or even the request) of their teachers!

Which brings me to iTeach 2014.

At San Domenico School technology is a vital tool in the entire educational process. Teachers use it for their own personal productivity and for managing their educational resources and student grades and information. More importantly, because we are a 1:1 iPad school, we are engaing our students with technology every day. Having a powerful research and communication device stuffed in your backpack provides amazing access to information. These devices also include a variety of tools we now call Apps. Students use them to collect, analyze, and produce their own projects based on their research.

This is all fine, as long as everyone knows how to use these tools.

In a recent survey of San Domenico teachers, 82% said they publish course materials online using a variety of "cloud" resources including Moodle, Blogs, Google Sites and Drive, Box, Turnitin, and our Library web page. 93% of our teachers say they engage their students with digital tools in their curriculum 25% of the time or more in class. Almost 40% of our students are required to complete some sort of digital portfolio as part of our curriculum.

92% of our teachers say their comfort level with using technology in their classroom is 5 or higher on a scale of 1-10. 68% said they were a 7 or higher. On the same scale, 77% of our teachers answered 7 or higher when asked how important it is to continue to expand the way they integrate technology in their curriculum.

When teachers were asked to name the most important areas for us to focus when thinking about ways to improve technology integration in our curriculum they answered:

   "More professional development"
   "Technology specific curriculum development"
   "Time to collaborate with my colleagues"

Whether it be regular faculty meetings, one of our school level technology committees, outside conferences and workshops, or the creation and delivery of  iTeach 2014, our teachers want to learn from and teach their colleagues what they know about teaching with technology.

Sharing what you know, and being willing to learn from others is certainly a hallmark of teaching and the teacher very often becomes the student when it comes to technology. Now, with  iTeach 2014, San Domenico teachers and other leading technology using educators come together to teach and to learn about using technology to enhance student learning.

Thank you Barbara for reminding me that engaging students with technology on a regular basis is a powerful way to deepen their learning. I look forward to learning with you at iTeach 2014 this summer.

Brad Lakritz
Director of Technology

iBooks Author and Book Creator Video Reviews

Here are two short video introductions to creating electronic books with Book Creator and iBooks Author created by San Domenico School religious studies teacher Mirza Kahn. They are intended to be helpful to a teacher interested in making and using electronic books in the classroom.

If you are viewing the blog on an iPad please click the text link to see the videos via the YouTube App. Computer users may watch the video within the blog entry by clicking the video thumbnail.

Book Creator video review

iBooks Author video review

For more on e-Books check out:

     Research and Non-Fiction Writing Guide

     8th Grade 2012 Voting Project




by Mirza Inayat Khan
Religious Studies Department

The Promise of Technology - HyperCard Was It or, Was It?

In 1945 Vannevar Bush, wrote As We May Think in the Atlantic Monthly. In the introduction to this groundbreaking article the editor explains Bush's thesis:

"instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages."

45 years later, Apple Computer, Inc. published Learning With Interactive Multimedia: Developing and Using Multimedia Tools in Education (Microsoft Press). Edited by Sueann Ambron and Kristina Hooper, this compilation promised to explore the ways in which "interactive multimedia gives us an opportunity to learn in new, more dynamic, and more exiting ways." In fact, said Ambron and Hooper, "We hope this book contributes to making that happen."

In those hopeful days for technology in education (years before the introduction of Netscape Navigator and the world wide web) teachers were most excited about Apple's HyperCard software. This new software allowed them to easily and quickly collect, collate, and deliver vast amounts of information for their students. In addition, teachers could create "interactive links" between the "cards' in their HyperCard "stacks" allowing students to explore random connections between related information.

With their $14 million purchase of the Silicon Valley company Forethought (makers of the Macintosh-based software called PowerPoint) Microsoft Corp. signaled it's own interest in digital interactive publishing.

At about the same time Tim Berners-Lee came up with idea of interactive, hyperlinked pages on something that would later be called the Internet.

While Microsoft was interested in helping businesses use PowerPoint to grow their profits and Apple envisioned digital publishing for educators and by students, Berners-Lee believed this information and creative interactive capabilities should be available to anyone anywhere in the world.

In their chapter from Learning With Interactive Multimedia,  "HyperCard: A New Deal in the Classroom," Lowell High School librarian Robert Campbell and english teacher Patricia Hanlon predict the future for technology in the classroom:

It is likely that it will be as easy to create materials that combine text, video, and audio as it is to do word processing today. We will be able to record and retrieve events from wherever we are: in the library, in the classroom, in the office, or at home. An audio interface with the computer will be commonplace, and software advances should be able to provide us with our own personalized intelligent agent who maintains our "electronic household" for us. Video via telephone will be commonplace. Television sets will be thin, wall size, of extremely high definition, and will contain a built-in computer.

23 years later the confluence of ideas that helped create hypermedia and the world wide web echo back to us as the San Domenico School enters our third year of a one to one iPad learning program.

Today education doesn't look exactly like Vannevar Bush's dream of information access or Campbell and Hanlon's view of the modern classroom. But at San Domenico School most of these ideas are in action every day.

Whether it be biology students taking pictures in the garden to document recycling in nature, middle school students making movies to document their science labs, or students in a religion class creating e-Books, San Domenico School students and teachers are using their iPad tablets to gather their information from a wide range of media sources. They use modern "cloud-based" tools to store and collate their data and the latest software "apps" to produce the interactive materials necessary to complete the assignments at hand.

In "HyperCard: A New Deal in the Classroom" Campbell and Hanlon try to answer the question of whether it's worth all the effort to integrate this new interactive technology in their classrooms:

To say that teaching with interactive media helps illustrate and dramatize things is both obvious and an understatement. It seems to inject a sense of immediacy and reality in a subject that is evident in the way students regard what they are studying. Rather than telling students that a subject is relevant or significant, we have a way of helping them to discover that for themselves. And in addition to the vividness and impact that learning in this way can have, it is also more effective and precise. Students more quickly grasp the issues and possibilities, and they find information more efficiently. When they find facts or helpful interpretations, or if they gain some insights, they have a powerful way to share them.

Teachers are quick to explore new technology because they know it will engage their students in learning and provide them with access to the information in a way Vannevar Bush imagined some 68 years ago.  Schools that embrace and support one to one programs will provide this deep learning environment for their students. This is no educational dream for San Domenico School students and teachers. We are creating this reality every day.

Brad Lakritz

Director of Technology

Sixth Graders publish their own books with Book Creator

Middle School history teacher Wynn Richards empowered students to make their own books on their iPads:

Sixth graders in my classes created myths while studying ancient Greece. They made them in groups, which added an interesting element. Each group found pictures that illustrated their myths, then emailed everything to me. I have the Book Creator app on my iPad and I imported the myths and pictures to create a class book. At first it took time to estimate how much text could fit on each page, because the text does not flow from page to page. I soon got the hang of it and it was fun to put the book all together!

Please check out the two books we made (shared in PDF format):

6-1 Greek Myths

6-2 Greek Myths

Reinventing the Textbook with iBooks Author

Middle School Teacher Mirza Khan is our pioneer using iBooks Author. Today's post describes his first use of an iBooks textbook he created — less than a week after Apple released their iBooks Author tool:

Recently Apple introduced a series of iBook textbooks designed for the iPad. At the same time they released the software for Mac OS that allows you to make your own. These iBook textbooks include smart layouts, text, interactive pictures, videos, glossaries, highlighting and note-taking programs. These are books that move, interact, and come alive. And, as is the case with the exemplary Life on Earth by E.O. Wilson, they can be quite beautiful.

Like many of us, I have been making “textbooks” for years - first by stapling together packets of Xeroxed handouts, but later by making class websites and such. So I was very excited about the new software and spent my weekend making a textbook to introduce into my eighth grade class.

This afternoon I used the textbook in class for the first time. And I think I might have learned more than the students. Here are some of the key lessons:

Lesson One – Have a backup plan: Being a large file, my iBook took a long time to download. And many of the students needed to run an update just to open it. These are the normal birth pangs of any new technology in the classroom. And luckily I had a short writing assignment for the wait. But twenty minutes into class only half of my students had completed the download.

Lesson Two – Be willing to change: With only half of the class possessing my iBook, I divide the class into pairs. Each pair shared one textbook and together they read a chapter and took notes. It wasn’t the original plan, but I was happy that they were able to work together, discuss, and interact.

Lesson Three – An iBook is a book: The iBook is a wonderfully reinvented textbook, but it is still just a book. After the class had read their chapters, watched their embedded videos, interacted with images, highlighted and taken notes, we where in the same place as every teacher and every class: What do we do with the information we have read? How do we make sense out of it? How do we integrate it toward some conclusion that is relevant to us and our world?

iParents in the Classroom event

Our Head of School, Dr. David Behrs, highlights our "iParents in the Classroom" event which was held this week on our campus.  Dr. Behrs was pivotal in unifying the leadership of our School in all three divisions around the promise of integrated technology in the curriculum utilizing the iPad as our digital tool of choice:

Dr. Behrs welcoming families

We just concluded our "iParents in the Classroom" night. I am so proud of our students, faculty, and staff for developing and executing this informative program for parents. When we began integrating technology further into our classroom this year with our 1-to-1 student iPad program, we knew it would transform teaching and learning by building on the strong student-centered learning we foster at San Domenico. I don't think we fully appreciated the impact or how well the iPads would work in our classrooms. Every day I walk around this campus and see exciting projects and teaching occurring with lots of social group work that is so engaging.

This coming year we are going to continue to grow our integrated technology program in age appropriate ways. In addition to iPads in grades 6-12, we will have a 1-to-1 program in grades 4 & 5, an iPad cart in 3rd grade, and expanded iPad stations in K, 1, and 2.  Our "iTeach 2012" event in June (www.sandomenico.org/iteach2012) will bring educators from around the country to our campus to benefit from our leadership and experience from this pivotal year.

It's difficult to express the energy of this great evening.  Much like a traditional science fair, tables around the room featured students who demonstrated all kinds of apps and how they're used in (and out!) of the classroom.  A video montage from the evening gives a taste of the students' enthusiasm and engagement.


I want to give special thanks to all the students who showcased their amazing work; their families for supporting their participation; the all-school technology committee who coordinated everyone's amazing efforts, and and all our faculty & staff. What a wonderful community we have here at San Domenico!

My very best,

Dave Behrs

Apple shakes things up.. again!

Apple made a series of exciting announcements today related to education that are worth serious reflection in the coming days. When we committed to integrating technology in the curriculum with a 1-to-1 student iPad program, our teachers and leadership saw a natural connection with San Domenico's integrated sustainability curriculum. Handouts and assignments can be "passed out" to students and "returned" to teachers digitally without being printed.

Further, traditional textbooks -- with their weight, cost, and limitations -- seem ripe for iPad replacement. We have been successfully using HMH Fuse Algebra 1 in Algebra classes but few similar products have existed. Our faculty have experimented with moving "beyond" the textbook with course web pages or collections of material hosted in our cloud.

Apple, today, announced a series of new products that continue to push the iPads effectiveness as a textbook replacement. iBooks Textbooks promises to give us easier access to traditional textbook content on the iPad with a compelling interface. iBooks Author looks like it will give our own faculty the opportunity to take their own work and make it available on our students' iPads with a real Multi-Touch interface.

We don't yet understand all the implications of these announcements yet. I was excited that the infrastructure of the Volume Purchase Program does work with textbooks but I'm not certain how to deploy books to hundreds of iPads quite yet. One thing seems clear to me: the new offerings look strong and will do what Apple often does best: shake things up.

I welcome your comments and thoughts on today's news!

Christopher K. Sokolov