Session 2 – Matts Hands On Session - Chemistry

My hands on session went very well – I had a full room with extras, so that was nice!  They all love Australians over here, so I’m sure the accent was the attraction rather than me…

Whilst my hands on session was publicised as being a Chemistry session, there was only one Chem teacher in the room.  There were also some people with very little knowledge of Tablets, so I had a wide range of experiences to deal with!  What is really nice about running this kind of session is the conversations during and after – we all ended up talking pedagogy and strategies for professional development of staff, rather than the content area itself.

I did the presentation live in DyKnow, running to each of the 22 tablets in the room.  This worked really well, and the quick primer that I ran will be the basis for the PD I am running back at school on the student free day next week.  Its nice to have a trial run here before I do the important people back at school!  In Dyknow I showed basic usage, replay features, how to obtain, grade, and return the student work, how to do instant polls, how you can control the students computer and which programs runs, which websites can be visited and I also showed how you can send a file to the students, and force it to open and run.  This was all taken very well, and the DyKnow representative (Laura) there to help out gave some nice feedback.  I also showed the participants Tablet Flash cards and the software ChemPad, which is specifically for chemistry!  The whole thing was done in the context of a Chemistry lesson, and I taught all people there how to draw and name organic carbon molecules – by the end we had some good drawings from the participants!