I went along to the High School of Glasgow this evening for TeachMeet Tablet 2. Work and traffic conspired to make me pretty late and I had missed the first set of presentations, arriving in time for the round tables.

At the last minute I had volunteered to organise one of these, on workflow, handing out work and gathering it in on iPads. I demoed showbie and we had a chat about some edge cases and how these could work.

After that we had some more presentations:

Sally Foster talked about using one iPad in class, with more ideas than I could take notes for. I liked, in particular, the idea of a the teacher moving round the classroom and showing pupil work on the smartboard via Apple TV (you could use a computer and AirServer too).

Paul Casey showed some apps for teacher workflow, Planbook, Gradebook, HanDBase, and iBooks (and Author). All of these apps look as if they can help with teacher planning and organisation.

Both Sally’s and Paul’s presentations were of interest to anyone with an iPad, you didn’t need to be in a 1-2-1 classroom to get some great ideas.

David Muir then started what looks like a long term view, over several teachmeets at the SAMR moodle. Using iBooks he too us from substitution to augmentation, demoing some nice features of the iBooks app an a few minutes.

My own presentation was the last. I was showing an example of using several different apps in a row do preform a task. I’ve found myself often doing this in iOS and noticed in classroom visits that primary pupils seem to pick this up naturally, more so perhaps than with traditional desktops.

I’ve seen this referred to as app smashing or chaining, I prefer the idea of a playflow, having fun with a series of applications. (I do not want to smash or chain anything up). Here is a quick and dirty screencast of the process I demoed, the only difference was at teachmeet I recorded an audience produced series of croaks as an audio track to the final movie.

This particular flow is adapted from one shown to me by my collegue Ian Sorensen.

Here is the process.

1. Starting in Safari, use morguefile.com to find a copyright free photo.
2. Save to Photo Library/Camera Roll
3. Use superimpose to save a ‘mask’ with a transparent background.
4. Saved To Photo Library
5. Explain Everything: Import background then add image with transparent background. Create recording of image moving across background.
6. Export movie to Photo Library.
7. Open in iMovie for further editing.

I was delighted to see this tweet linking to a video today, showing I had at least a little impact:

@johnjohnston inspired John Raven film. Question for P5-7: How was this video made? http://t.co/QzrWvBFOTO

— Mr Archibald (@BKPrimary) October 30, 2013

Watch the #TMTablet tweets for the next teachmeet tablet.