I Pad's in the classroom-Session #2

(Claus) Like Mr. Phillips and Mr. Hageman, the first thing that stood out to me was the five recommendations the author’s made, to teacher who were planning on using tablets in their classrooms.  The one that I related to the most was the recommendation about teachers knowing everything about the tablets their students would be using.  This would be a pretty easy thing to do if all your students had the same tablet but with BYOD you have no idea what you are going to get.  In reality there is no way a teacher can know every tablet out there, inside and out.  I guess I shouldn’t say it is impossible but highly unlikely considering all the other things teachers must master.  In my own classroom I have seen how not knowing all the different operating systems can hinder the learning process.  It is very difficult when you have some students who have a device that will work with the program you want to use and others do not.  I am not sure what the solution to this problem is besides requiring students to have a specific operating system on their devices.

I also agree that the technology you choose to use in your classroom must be used on a daily basis.  I feel as if I use technology a lot in my classroom but not everyday.  After reading Mr. Phillips’ post about the teacher at the high school using her companion site everyday in class, I began to think about how I could use my site in my classroom everyday.  There are several roadblocks I think about when processing how to incorporate my site into everyday instruction.  The first is having the technology available for students to use,  we only have two computer carts for our team and other teachers need to use them as well.  Although students can bring their own devices I still have several students without their own devices to use in class.  Also there are several challenges with math, as I wrote about last week in my blog.  This semester I am making it my goal to incorporate my companion site more effectively in my daily instruction.  

Overall, I thought the article gave an insight on some helpful hints when incorporating tablets into the classroom.  I look forward to continue researching the best practices when it come to BYOD.