Mobile Schools: The Next Generation in Communication and Engagement

As an early adopter of transformative technologies, I have been watching the mobile app space carefully to see how it can benefit all facets of education.  By being a thought leader in the use of digital technology in schools, I was approached by a bold start-up in Boston called Beeonics, which wanted to talk to me about their breakthrough technology.  I had them come down and meet with several student leaders and me this past spring where I shared my vision of having a mobile app for New Milford HS, which could also be shared with other schools.  This work, has rapidly resulted in, I am very excited to say, a native mobile app for the NMHS community that cost my district absolutely nothing thanks to the work of my students and staff. 

My vision is for every high school around the country to have its own native mobile app.  For a high school, having its own native mobile application is a tremendously valuable asset as a tool to communicate more rapidly and efficiently within its community and as a means to help administrators, teachers, coaches, students, and parents to organize more productively all school activities.  As many of you know, here at New Milford High School we have been at the forefront of adopting social media and the latest technologies to improve the way we run our educational and extra-curricular programs. Understanding how mobile devices can be used to benefit all the constituents of our community is a staple of our long-standing commitment to bring technology to the use of our community.  

Using Beeonics technology, we have been able to quickly create a state-of-the-art native mobile application with a rich set of features.  Our application can be managed very easily by our staff through a website with a user-friendly graphical interface. We envision every school benefiting from having their own native mobile application.  Therefore, we want every school to benefit from our work.  Thanks to Beeonics technology, any school can take our mobile application as a template and almost instantly create their own native mobile application, customized to their school.  We will continue to add to our application while making these additions and improvements available to any school, public or private, so please check back often.

Where we stand today is that the New Milford High School native mobile application is now in use by the students, faculty, staff, and parents at New Milford High School on iOS (iPhone and iPad) and Android devices (smart phones and tablets).  All the constituents of the NMHS community are both intrigued and excited by its capabilities. The new school-year version of the application will be available during the first week of September.

I am sure at least some of you, maybe even many of you, are dubious that creating the app itself was easy, let alone easy-to-manage.  However, I assure you any school can do it.  Remember when doing a web site was hard 20 years ago?  Today, a non-engineer can go to SquareSpace, GoDaddy, Wordpress, and many others and make a good web site in a few days, sometimes even hours. This is the Beeonics vision, but for mobile apps (which is a much harder problem with different operating systems, different versions within operating systems, and devices of markedly different size and dimension).  Let me tell you what we did.

The mobile application was developed directly from the input of a group of students, teachers, and administrators. The process was quick and efficient. Modifications and improvements were rapidly implemented.  The mobile application comes with a user-friendly website, which staff and administrators can use to easily share content and notifications with their students in real time. A group of students, teachers, and administrators tried the mobile application during the last four weeks of the previous school year. We collected further feedback and ideas for additional functionality, which were used over the summer to fine tune the application and associated website in the new school-year version.  We made the changes and, voilà!, we have a richly-featured mobile app.

I wanted a mobile app for the community of stakeholders at NMHS for many reasons. First, for the students, the application helps them organize their schedule, activities, and homework, and provides them with real-time updates on classes, activities, and athletics.  Specifically, for students, the app enables them to:

• Access their personalized class/activity schedule and homework planner, with which they can organize all their assignments
• Access exclusive content/information on their classes, activities, sports, and clubs
• Stay in close touch with their teachers and coaches
• Ask questions and receive answers from their teachers and coaches at any time (within reason!)
• Receive notifications and announcements from the school and from their teachers regarding delayed openings, emergencies, schedule changes, room changes, practices, meetings, events, and other information
• Stay always up-to-date on all school events and activities that interest them
• Enroll and follow clubs and activities, as well as check the latest scores and events
• Use their phone as their lunch card in the school cafeteria
• Get lunch menus and nutrition information about school food
• Use their phone as a secure electronic ID to access the school
• Provide feedback on relevant topics and participate in polls
• Access their grades
• Access general school information and contacts

The students are excited because they can have all this information and all these capabilities always available and immediately accessible on their phones, rain or shine, in or out of school.

With respect to teachers and coaches, they are now able to:

• Easily assign and manage homework, without creating extra work for themselves
• Easily distribute and manage content/information relevant to each class, practice, or meeting
• Notify in real time the students in their class or on their team of changes in rooms, practices, meetings, games, venues, and any other information
• Stay in-touch with their students, team members, other coaches and teachers, and parents
• Manage in one stop all the social media channels that they use to communicate with their students, team members, and parents

This functionality helps us run the internal functions of the school more effectively, more efficiently, more easily, and with a fun factor we have not had before. The app also allows the constituency outside of the school, the parents, guardians, and other stakeholders to: 

• Follow and participate in parent/guardian organizations
• Receive real-time notifications and announcements from the school, teachers, and coaches
• Stay always up-to-date on all school events and activities that interest them; check the latest scores and event updates
• Access school information on all the social media channels
• Access general school information, and contact information of administrators and teachers

The parents are excited because they can have the peace of mind that they are always up-to-date and informed of the activities of their children and notified of any time-sensitive information. Last, but by no means least, I would be remiss if I did not address how this benefits me and the administration of NMHS.

We use the mobile application to:

• Notify the entire school population in real time of school closings, delayed openings, schedule changes, events, and hopefully never, emergency situations
• Distribute information and notifications to all the social media channels, including the New Milford High School Facebook and Twitter page
• Most importantly, it does so without having to recreate work or duplicate materials from one area to another.  I did not want to do anything to make my job or the job of my terrific staff any harder.

What I love the most about our native mobile application, in addition to the obvious positive impact that it has throughout our community, is that I can reach all my constituents instantly and reliably, on the one device which is the most personal and which is (unless they leave it at home like I have a few times before!) always with them.

I am really excited about the mobile app and even more excited that all of you can take advantage of the work done by my students, staff, teachers, coaches, and parents to bring the same capabilities we have today to your school quickly. To that end, I have asked Beeonics to offer our app to other schools for only $1.49 per user per academic year as a favor to me and because we helped Beeonics debug their software (the Beeonics app is normally $2.99 per user per academic year).  The company has graciously agreed.  This offer stands through the end of 2013.  Please go to http://www.beeonics.com to register and use the keyword “Eric”.

Apps and Social Media in the Classroom

It is springtime at New Milford High School and new ideas are flourishing.  Teachers are consistently empowered and given the autonomy to take calculated risks without the fear of failure to enhance the teaching and learning process.  The end result is that our students benefit from lessons that combine sound pedagogy with the effective integration of technology. Below are two highlights from the month of April.

In support of the school’s BYOD initiative, Mrs. Chellani has recently discovered and integrated a new app called Socrative, a free, online polling tool.  This app allows students to respond to questions the teacher asks in class via their smart phone, providing an alternate means for students to participate in class.  The results are displayed on the SMART Board through the Socrative website to facilitate discussion.  Additionally, this app serves as another way for Mrs. Chellani to formally assess her students in a differentiated and technologically advanced fashion. 

Students in Mr. Devereaux's AP Biology class are creating social media accounts for the immune system.  Using Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Tumblr, the students need to narrate a day in the life of the immune system.  They have been finding creating ways of using hash tags, mentions, pictures, videos, and various other ways to infuse their projects with relevant, accurate, and interactive content illustrating how the immune system works.  Check out Mr. Devereaux's website by the end of the week to see some student examples.

There's An App For That

New Milford High School’s digital journalism class, which operates The Lance, the school’s online news source, is proud to announce the release of their very own free application.  The application is available for Apple and Android operating systems.

The Lance reports on news in and around New Milford’s community on a weekly basis.  The students of digital journalism partnered with Crescerance to develop an app that is easily accessible and touches on the features of the news site that students and residents of the community use the most.  The application is an easy way for New Milford residents to keep up-to-date on the mumblings of the heart of the community -- it’s students.  

Once users download this free app to a smart device, they can peruse the different features easily, with one-touch access to news, photos, the school calendar, The Lance’s blog and the complete athletics schedule.  Users can also take a picture with their device that is watermarked with the news source’s logo, which can then be sent to The Lance for publication on the site with credits to the photographer.

Additionally, there is easy access to weekly polls, staff biographies, and users can even contact the staff with leads and comments.  Perhaps the best feature of the app is the ability for users to add sports events to their calendars from the app, as well as receive push notifications about updates to the site or meeting/event cancellations.

This is a revolution in high school news reporting.  With readers from as far away as Australia, the staff of The Lance is finding that the application brings them that much closer to their readers and followers, bringing 21st century news reporting to their doorsteps at the touch of a finger.

Please feel free to download our app and let us know what you think so that I can share your thoughts with our students.

Tapping Into Technology

With the rise of mobile devices and tablets in the classroom, I’m finding so many examples of organizations that are capitalizing on these tools to create new resources for teachers and students. I was recently introduced to an education reform model called TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement that is making really great use of the tablet and mobile platforms to provide teachers with better access to teacher resources with an iPhone or iPad app.

 Image credit: http://blog.bautomation.com/Portals/110740/images/taping-into-technology.jpg

Founded in 1999 by education philanthropist Lowell Milken, The TAP system is working in public schools across the country to provide teachers with greater means for professional development, more effective uses of student and teacher evaluation data, and creating career opportunities that enhance instruction and learning within their schools while remaining in the classroom by creating positions like mentor teachers and master teachers.  These mentor and master teachers observe other teachers and lead reflective meetings about how to improve student performance based on data they’ve collected in evaluations. You can find more information about TAP here.

Recently the organization announced the creation of a TAP “app” called the tapObserver app. Teachers can download the app onto their iPhones or iPads and to access evaluation forms, rubrics, lesson tracking and several other forms specific to the program model. The app enhances the TAP system evaluation process by helping evaluators (principals, master and mentor teachers) more efficiently and accurately collect evidence during a classroom observation. It is a powerful tool for providing evaluation feedback and support more quickly and thoroughly to improve teacher practice.

Web-based tools like this are such a great addition to the classroom, giving teachers the ability to streamline their workload, gauge and adapt to student performance, and make the most out of every lesson. Hopefully we will see other education programs will develop similar apps like this. If you use any apps like this in your school, I'd love to hear about it.

My Quick List of iPad Apps

Yesterday after receiving my iPad I quickly reached out to my PLN for some suggestions on which apps to download.  The key for me is that I will be using this device at work in concert with my administrative team during administrative walk-throughs, observations, and to take notes during meetings (I am sure some other uses will come up as I get more acclimated with the iPad).  So after roughly 12 hours here is my quick list of some applications that I feel educational administrators and other educators should have on their device.  I will provide a brief description of each if warranted.  Also, all the apps listed below are FREE!!!

1.    Evernote: Fantastic tool for notes, ideas, recordings,
       pictures, etc.
2.    Cloud Browse: Easily access Flash, JAVA, and Google Docs.
3.    iBooks: Download and read books.
4.    LinkedIn: Professional networking and contacts at your
       fingertips.
5.    Dragon Diction: Easy to use voice recognition program.
6.    FeeddlerRSS: RSS reader that easily syncs with Google
       Reader.
7.    Facebook: What better way to update the
       NMHS Facebook page!
8.    Dictionary & Thesaurus: Even includes word of the day!
9.    The Weather Channel: Every educator should know what
       the weather is going to be like each day.
10.  Delicious: Access all your bookmarks quickly and easily.
11.  World Book: Today in History: History information when you
       want it.
12.  Google Earth: Having the world in the palm of your hands
       isn't a bad thing.
13.  Dropbox: MUST HAVE! Easily sync/share files across computers and online
14.  Infinote: Post-It-Note creation tool.

*** 13 and 14 were added thanks to Beth Swantz!

As far as Twitter apps go I have been playing around with both TweetDeck and Twitterrific.  For all the Google nuts out there like me, I highly recommend going into your internet browser and adding Gpanion to your home screen (it will then show up as an icon on your apps page).  Once logged in you will then have easy access to all of your Google Apps! Feel free to add to this list in the comments section.