Remember the days before GPS/smartphones and you gave directions to your house (or were given directions to someone else’s house)? Neither of you had paper, so the directions were just verbalized to you. How many wrong turns were taken? I know learned the back streets of Anchorage, unintentionally, this way!
Now imagine a teacher giving students the following directions: “Okay class, open Safari, go to bls.discoveryeducation.com, and login. When you’re logged in, click in the search bar and type Boston Tea Party. Now click on grade level and select 6-8. Next click on subject and choose social studies. Now click on media types and select video segments. When the results appear, choose The Boston Tea Party.”
I’ve said this exact thing with my students, while showing it on my laptop. Students followed along on laptops and very few students got ‘lost’ because they could see where my pointer was the whole time. Ever try this on an iPad? THERE’S NO POINTER!!! Well, here’s a fix for that, should you find a need for it.
On your iPad:
- Navigate to: Settings>General>Accessibility>Assistive Touch
- Turn the slider to On (you’ll get a white dot on your screen after this)
- Tap Create New Gesture
- On the New Gesture screen, tap once on the screen then tap Save
- Give your New Gesture a name (I named mine ‘tap’)
Now, when you are in the app, to get the pointer tap on the white assistive touch dot, tap Favorites (the star) and select the gesture you just created. Now, as long as you remain in that app, you have a circle pointer that helps students track what and where you are tapping.