When technology means doing the same thing in a difficult way!

I want to start off by saying that I think the use of technology as part of the learning process for students has opened up endless opportunities for them. This post is more about us, as educators. Now, this is not a criticism or a judgement, it's just something that I have been thinking about. We have introduced BYOD for our year 7 students this year, which has been an amazing adventure for all involved, staff and students alike. So, I have been busily looking for lots of different ways to utilise this great resource. As you know, I am a Mathematics teacher and many would say that mathematics is a very traditional subject with a rigid set of processes and rules, and in some ways it can be. Mathematics also provides many great problem solving opportunities which requires high order thinking processes. So you would think the integration of technology in a meaningful way into mathematics would be difficult, and until I really started looking, I would have agreed. I have been surprised at all the great things you can do, not just with the iPad, but also with a laptop.  

At the start of this year, I had a goal to go as paperless as I could and I am still passionate about doing that. To help this occur, I have been providing my students with PDF documents via google drive and then they annotate them using PDF cabinet and then share them back with me in their shared google drives. And that has been fine, the work flow isn't ideal, but the students have managed to do that. However, it is more difficult for me to mark their work this way than if they had completed it on paper. While looking for ways to simplify this process I realised that I was trying to make the iPad a worksheet, which quite obviously it isn't. Thinking about what I was doing, and others, I realised I was trying to get the iPad to change instead of me changing. I was wanting to do the same as I'd always done, and try and get the iPad to fit. So I have another goal this year, stop trying to change an inanimate object and make some significant changes myself.