 Hi, my name is Ben Rimes and this is my presentation for the K-12 online conference 2014 for the iPad's killer app. Now a lot of people are really fixated on finding the best app to collaborate, to create, to communicate and quite often they overlook one of the most powerful apps that's included with every iPad or Android tablet or Kindle Fire tablet or Nook or just about any other tablet on the market today and that's the camera app. Before we get into that, here's just a little bit about me so you can understand where I'm coming from. My official title in my district is the K-12 Instructional Technology Coordinator. Basically that means I'm a jack of all trades and I get to have a lot of fun playing with technology throughout the district with teachers, with students, sometimes with parents and I also get to help facilitate bringing in outside presenters to work with our teachers. You can find my website here, techsavvied.net, or you can follow me on Twitter at techsavvied as well. My wife and I are fairly creative, slightly odd individuals. We won a trophy for our Halloween costume prowess. My daughter is a ballerina and my son is the Easter Bunny. Well, at least he was this year. So now that you know a little bit more about me, I want to know what has your school district done to look at the common core? Now I know a lot of people are not exactly excited about talking about this but I think it's really important because I've noticed that a lot of school districts have done crosswalks. They've taken a look at their current standards and they've compared them to the common core. That's a fantastic, great starting point but I notice a lot of school districts have yet to do some really deep dives, digging into the standards. In fact, I've seen some districts that haven't even touched upon the college and career readiness standards which is real shame because a lot of these standards are some of the same exact standards, sentiments and ideals that I see a lot of creative and innovative teachers using in their classroom already. Now going beyond that, there are some standards that touch particularly upon technology and digital media. What am I talking about? If you go to this document that I've created, bit.ly slash cc technology or scan the code below with your mobile device, you'll find a Google document that contains every single common core standard related to either technology or digital media. I pulled all of these out and assembled them in this document so that I had a simple tool when working with my teachers that I could pull up individual standards when they thought, well, I don't know if the standard applies to me or they say, I don't understand how technology can be used in my content area. This document has been tremendously helpful for pulling up standards within their content area or college and career readiness standards which cover K-12 that all teachers can meet. This standard in particular, the college and career readiness anchor standards for speaking and listening under the presentation of knowledge and ideas is vitally important. Right here, it says K-5 through 6-12, all students must make strategic use of digital media and visual displays of data to express information and enhance understanding of presentations. Let's go ahead and ignore the data portion for now and just focus on the digital media. What does that mean? I look at this standard as a means to task students and teachers to use audio, video, and still images to enhance how they present what it is they know or try to wrestle with concepts that they are just starting to understand. So what could this look like? Well, according to what video games have to teach us about learning and literacy by James Paul G, good instructional design mirrors good game design. In other words, we should just get learners right into the action immediately. Get them wrestling with concepts, get them taking images, get them taking video, capturing audio, just basically starting with the tools that they're going to use to present their learning later rather than waiting until they've mastered a concept before thinking about how they're going to present it. And then there's a new culture of learning by Douglas Thomas and John C. Lee Brown which talks about explorative play. In other words, we're not just sitting there passively receiving play, we're actually building knowledge along with the instructor in this environment that's conducive to tablets, video, audio, and imagery. So let's play for a little bit ourselves. Let's imagine what could happen if you turned your learners loose with cameras and tasked them with just some simple basic challenges. What if you challenged your students to teach someone else in their classroom or maybe even a classroom in another school district by producing their own teaching videos? Here's an excellent example from Brenda Munch's elementary students. Hello, we're going to teach you a bit about multiplication. What is multiplication? Multification is when you put a certain number in tops. Let's put the title in tops. This is three groups of nine. You would write this like this. Three times nine equals 27. Another way is like this. Nine times three equals 27. Times means equal groups. Spanish in real life was an excellent opportunity for students in Mary Zemlich's Spanish classroom to capture images of Spanish out in the real world using their own handheld devices, their phones, their iPads, and then posting them to a group blog. Video story problems is an excellent way of taking problems and curiosities that already exist out in the real world and bringing them into our classroom. They don't have to be flashy. They don't have to be fancy. Just go ahead and turn your camera on, capture something, bring it into the classroom. Let the learners know that you're wrestling with real world questions, real world curiosities, not just learning activities that model the real world. Hey guys, Mr. Rhymes here. And I want you to help me figure out which one of these deals on crackers is the best deal. Okay, so these are the first types of crackers. These are the Kiebler Club and Cheddar Crackers, all right? This is an eight pack right here. You can see that, eight pack. And currently they are on sale two for $5, see that? So two of these packages, so that's 16 packs. And in each pack there are six crackers, two for $5. Now up here, we've got the cheese and peanut butter. I'm not as big a fan of these as I am the club and cheddar, but yeah, you might like these. Now these are an eight pack as well, okay? But these are not two for five, these are just $1.99. Okay, so it's $1.99 for this eight pack, again, there are six crackers per pack. All right, so there you go, the cheese and peanut butter or the club and cheddar. Which one of these two deals is the better deal today? Good luck. Elements of Art is an idea that my wife uses in her art classrooms with the iPads that she has available in which the students are tasked to travel around their school building and identify elements of art by taking pictures of examples of those elements. This is a really simple activity, it's engaging and it works at the secondary level as well as the elementary. Math walks are another excellent way to get kids engaged. Give them an iPad, send them out into the hallways with some simple guidelines and have them capture some images that represent the mathematical concepts that you're talking about. Geometric concepts, concepts of measurement, of number sense, it doesn't matter. Just task them with bringing things in. It can be a great example of formative assessment. Now it's your turn to play. I've shared with you a bunch of examples and hopefully I've given you a good firm foundation to stand on when it comes to going out into the real world and capturing learning or maybe even getting a little bit messy and just taking some photos or some videos of things around you and bringing into the classroom and saying, how do we make sense of this? Because when it comes down to it, the real killer application of iPads and any other mobile device in our classrooms is the ability to take them out into the real world, to capture elements of it and bring it back into our classrooms. Not just use them for the same old learning with technology that we've always done. The app-based, the digital worksheet-based activities that we do all the time. It's time to let those go and see what our students are capable of showing us. If you have a little bit of difficulty, start with this really simple decision tree. Decide, am I going to capture video or still images? Remember, you're just going to be using the camera app on your iPad or your Android tablet or your personal device, whatever it is you happen to have. We're not going to use any apps right now. Just capture the raw images or video. You could create a math activity, science activity, digital storytelling, social studies, language, arts. You could even create a simple video talking about vocabulary for one of your units and having students identify elements out in the real world that help them understand those vocabulary terms a little bit better. That goes across content areas. Once you've done that, go ahead and do it. And then come back here and submit it using this link to a Google form, bit.ly slash visual app submit. This is a really simple Google form where you can submit your idea and the learning goals that you hope to achieve with it. So that way you can share it with a larger audience. Once you've done that, you can visit this link right here, bit.ly slash visual examples where you can see all of the really engaging creative and fun visual activities that participants in my workshops have already created. So as you can see, there's already a lot of really great activities there for you. Teachers that are using the camera to capture visual examples of learning to bring into the classroom. I hope I got some creative juices flowing in you. I hope that you got some ideas, but most importantly, I hope that you begin to build some confidence so that you can stop worrying about all of these things that are on your iPad and really focus on this thing right here and allow your students to drive the learning in your classroom by showing you how they're building knowledge and then presenting it to you by bringing in elements of the real world around them. Thanks for watching.