For the past two years, I have been lucky enough (or unlucky if you are less inclined to use technology) to have classroom sets of iPads for my geometry classes and have been able to experiment pretty easily with some different ways of teaching – collecting homework electronically (that was a fail), using Geogebra and Notability to get some really nice diagrams (that was pretty great!) and working with Voicethread to have students collaborate at home during homework. I gave a CwiC session talk last year at the Anja S. Greer conference on my use of Voicethread as a means of collaboration in problem solving and it went over really well. Here’s an example of how students used it:

So since I felt like that was so helpful as a discussion forum in the evenings (and also allowed more time in class for discussion the next day), I wanted to find other apps that might be just as helpful.  One of the things kids didn’t like about Voicethread was that it forced asynchronicity – there was no way to talk to someone online.  In fact, what sometimes happened was that a student would post a question and no one would respond until maybe 11 pm, and then by that time they might’ve gone to bed or moved onto their French homework or something.  Bummer.

So now this year I’m going to try a new app called Talkboard.  This is a really cool app that allows a student to send an IM or email to another student (or more than one) and then have a conversation (with voice) while also seeing writing and drawing real-time.  These synchronous discussion are kept in “projects” that can be saved and even exported as a pdf (without sound sadly) but there can be a record of their ideas.  Students can come to class the next day with some work on the iPad that contains the ideas they had for the problem solving process.  You can keep adding pages to the project and you can also import pictures – like graphs and diagrams from geogebra or desmos.  So I’m pretty pumped to try this out.

If anyone has used this app and has some experience with it, I’d love to hear about it!  Thanks so much!  …and happy experimenting!