Managing Classroom Tech

There's a few basic tricks you can keep up your sleeve in the classroom management space when working with mobile tech in students' hands.  They're all really useful for smoothing out your own routines, and for building some positive habits in the kids that they can carry from year to year, and build a really positive, constructive culture of tech use across the entire school.

Purpose

Kids of this generation take connected, handheld tech for granted, the same way we look at the TV or the telephone.  Every single student in your school was born after Facebook launched.  Tech is part of the furniture for them.  Treat it like this in the classroom.

It's not "History with iPads," it's history.  It's not "Literacy with iPads," it's literacy.  It's not.. you get the idea.

We can safely assume that our classrooms are not the first places our students have laid their hands on a digital device of some kind.  We can probably also take a punt that in most cases they've not been expected to use technology for a constructive, rigorous purpose outside of our classrooms.
 For lack of a more elegant way of saying it, technology in our classrooms needs to be put in its place.  Keep that purpose right out front.

Attention

The big one.  Colourful interactive screens are brilliant at grabbing kids' attention, and they have a way of overriding kids' own self-control & willpower.  The simple technique?

Lids closed.

Break your lesson down into sections (the way you would anyway), and when you need all their faces pointed in the same direction at the same time, get them to close their device cases.  Lids down on laptops, cases closed on tablets.  They won't lose anything, and they won't be tempted.  You can also build in some gradual release with older kids & ask them to manage their own attention with a "hands off, eyes up" approach to get them to take charge of their own attention.

Continuity

Since you've got a lot of iPads here, you need to do some workarounds in order to get the same kind of continuity you could expect from a more traditional networked computers scenario.  The simplest way to work around this is to always have the same kids go back to the same devices.  Class list, iPad number next to each student's name, and you immediately have the capacity for kids to pick up where they left off.

The other side to this is accountability.  Apps get moved around, folders get renamed or the background gets changed?  Check your lists.  Someone's work gets deleted?  Check your lists.  Something untoward ends up in the search history?  Check your lists.

Transparency

It sounds small and petty, but the angle at which a student's device sits on their desk makes a massive difference to how your whole school culture for learning technology develops.

An iPads is not a laptop.

The whole thing happens on the screen.  From a purely physical perspective looking only at balance and ergonomics, they don't work very well propped up like laptop screens.  Flip the case around to that shallow angle, and you'll get a much better productive flow.

Where it impacts culture is transparency.  A screen propped up like a laptop is a visual barrier.  Screens laid on a shallow angle are much more open.  If the kids form this habit from a young age and it's understood that open & transparent are how we do things at school, you expose yourselves to far fewer problems that arise as a result of secrecy in digital spaces as the kids get older.