Audio+Assignment

Need
On January 19th of 2012 Apple made a huge announcement to the educational technology community. They announced that they have given their iBooks application (app.) on iPad an update that would make it possible for students to view and interact with textbooks in a whole new way. Their presentation and demonstration was very impressive and created a massive interest in using the technology as soon as possible. However, even before Apple's big announcement, schools were already seeking to purchase class sets of iPads so the students could experience learning with the new medium. Many apps are easy to learn, but some of the most crucial apps are a little more difficult to operate. Users would benefit well by learning these difficult apps with a face-to-face expert. This would be a very difficult task since not everyone has access to an Apple expert. An easier way would be to produce an audio guide that the learner could listen to on their iPad and follow along with the expert step-by-step. The iPad allows an app to run while simultaneously playing a digital music. The expert would guide them along the apps major functions and have them produce a product that they would likely make in real life. This would give the learner experience with the app similar to one-on-one training. A particularly difficult app to learn is called Pages. Pages is the iPad equivalent to Microsoft Word, a word processor. Guided audio training would be a great way to teach the learner the major functions of this application.

**Objectives**
After listening and following along with the guided Pages application audio training, the learner will be able to create a Pages document that includes a title, a picture with a frame, and body text that looks very similar to the example created during the tutorial.

After listening and following along with the guided Pages application audio training, the learner will be able to preform basic functions like changing the font and text size of selected text, saving and finding documents created on Pages, and selecting and highlighting text as instructed during the tutorial.

media type="file" key="Pages Tutorial.mp3" width="240" height="20"
 * Audio Lesson**


 * Assessment**

The learner will qualitatively assess their created document by comparing theirs to the document that was produced during the tutorial. The ideal document will appear as a picture and a word document embedded onto my website www.chasek20pd.weebly.com. By looking at their document and seeing the produced version, they will be able to self assess and get instant feedback on what skills they might need to improve upon. A picture of the document that was produced appears below next to a converted word file that is avalible to download.




 * Reflection**

I really enjoyed producing and editing the audio using Audacity. I have to admit that I was a little rusty but after playing around with the edit features it got fairly easy to add audio tracks and mix them accordingly. I also found that creating a bunch of sections limited my recording mistakes. The feature that was most helpful was the time shift tool. I was able to effectively cue in the tracks so that it sounded like one recording take.

Originally I decided to have the learners input a data table into their first document. After review and the total time of the track, I decided to leave out this feature. This is a feature that would be best taught in an intermediate tutorial.

There are a couple of improvements that this lesson could use. The first improvement is to add in clearer instructions at the very start of the tutorial. I think I should have made it clear that once the learner starts the audio track they can press the home screen button and open up another application while the audio track is still playing. This is a very important feature that got overlooked. The second improvement has do do with wait time. If someone is very new to the iPad they might have trouble finding a certain button or typing text into the document. On my next recording I will make sure to add in more wait time so the learner will have more time to follow along with me.

I think this will be really helpful to send out to my grant schools. A few of them have expressed interest in getting iPads for classroom use. Since iPad displays can be projected, the teacher and the students could follow along with me all together to learn the basics of Pages.