Drawing Parallels of Problem-solving

For the month of September I was lucky enough to have enough Xperia Z tablets for each student in my class courtesy of Sony.  I am a Sony Education Ambassador and I was provided with the tablets to do a case study. My goal was to see how the tablets could enhance learning in authentic ways.  I videotaped throughout the study and had the students themselves speak about using the tablets. 

What resonated for me was that although tablets were fun for the students, they really were an opportunity for problem-solving.  What I learned from my dissertation was that reading online required different usage of strategies and problem-solving as the second graders used search engines.  This certainly applied to working with the tablets.  Apps are like websites.  Many apps work together and are connected much like hyperlinks between web pages and sites.  For example, my students had to figure out which apps would accomplish their goals and how to get video, audio, and pictures into those apps. One of the tasks they had to accomplish was to annotate a blank map of the world with the names of the continents.  First, they needed to access the blank map by opening Google Drive. Once Google Drive opened the map it was sent to the Album app.  From the Album app it could be shared to Skitch for the annotations.  When the students were done they exported their maps back to Google Drive.  Some of the students toggled between the Google Earth app or Google images (where they first had to do a search to find completed apps).

Who knew that to create this picture it would take so much work!

The case study ended with a large Social Studies project in which the students were told to use the tablets in anyway they wanted to teach others what they new about the seven continents and five oceans (including the Southern Ocean).  Now that was a lot of problem-solving. I will discuss it in more detail in a future post.