We’re getting close to the end of our first full day in Delhi at the iPad Summit at the American Embassy School. I’m still a bit jet lagged but doing well, and I’m enjoying the Indian food (of course). But the focus of our trip is on iPads and technology, and it’s been an interesting day so far.
We’ve taken away a couple of interesting apps that we hadn’t seen before, and we got to see how the iPads are being used in some of the classrooms here at AES. We saw a lot of iPads being used for reflection in a lot of different ways. I think all of the classes here have their own blogs, and in the upper elementary it seems like most of the kids either have their own blog or are posting on a regular basis to the class blog.
One of the new tools I saw that was especially interesting was Infuse Learning. This is a student response app, similar in some ways to Socrative, which we have used in the past. This app seems to allow for a little more flexibility in the ways that students can respond (multiple choice, short answer, drawing, etc.) and in the ways that the data can be saved and accessed by the teachers. Definitely something I want to try.
Finally, we got a little sense of how the classroom teachers and the tech integrators work together. It’s clear that, like at our school, this endeavor of integrating technology into the classroom is a journey. One of our biggest challenges is how we organize ourselves so that we can find the time and space to collaborate. We still have some work to in this area so we can help move all our students and teacher a further in their learning.