Last week, I attended another Apple event at Little Falls. These are exciting sessions where teachers present things they are doing in class with the iPads. My son asked me what I learned. I told him about the science teacher who was having his students do video lab reports, and we discussed the advantages of using images and video when talking about science experiments. We talked about how a lab report he did last week would have benefited from having pictures or video.

Today, when I picked him up, he was super excited to talk to me about the experiment they did. It involved fire and a hard boiled egg. Hmmm… I was having a hard time envisioning what they did. He proudly told me he had a video of it! The video had helped his group answer the questions on the lab report, as they could watch it over and over to see what happened first.

He also shared it with his teacher, who asked him to email it to him so he can post it on his website. His teacher thought it was pretty great that he had done this!

So, my subversive iPad project continues….  While this is a great example of using the iPad for learning, I am surprised my son is not coming up with more ways to use it. It concerns me that he is just following the teacher lead (which is very little tech) instead of thinking on his own. We will be having more conversations about thinking how the tools on the iPad can help him learn and demonstrate learning.

Two huge advantages to using the camera/video camera in a science lab

• using in learning: watch it over and over to get data, be able to reproduce the set up, share with others
• share with your family: it was way easier to understand what he did by watching the video. We had a great conversation about it!

Hereś the experiment: