Thursday, April 4, 2013

Screenleap and iPads

Today I had the opportunity to turn a technology failure into a success using ScreenLeap in my 1:1 iPad middle school Spanish classroom.

My lesson plan was based on projecting an interactive presentation on an interactive whiteboard (IWB). The students would add to their notes from a previous class. However, the VGA port on my MacBook has become very temperamental, and the laptop did not detect the projector once it was connected.

My students were prepared for class with their iPads, and I directed them to ScreenLeap while I quickly logged into the site frommy MacBook and shared my entire screen (which was displaying the interactive presentation). Once I was sharing, ScreenLeap provided me with a code which I wrote on the board. The students keyed the code into the space provided on ScreenLeap and were amazed to be viewing my computer screen on their iPad!



ScreenLeap acts a mirroring tool. So students' iPad screens mirrored my computer screen in real time, with only a slight lag time for refreshing the image. However, they could not interact with the features of the presentation. I encouraged students to participate as they would if I were presenting at the IWB.

Students were able to take screen shots of the images in the presentation. Some students decided to  import the photos into note-taking apps and annotate on the images. Other students simply created a photo album on the iPad for these images to play back as a slide show.

Once we completed the interactive presentation, I navigated to an online quiz, and students took turns  contributing answers to the questions which I keyed into the site.

Students were very excited about this use of ScreenLeap in their Spanish classroom. Although I have used ScreenLeap in the past, the students had been disappointed in the lag time that occurs when a video is shared, and that the images on the video were too small. However, these were not issues with the presentation the I had prepared, and students were able to zoom in if an image were too small.

Overall, I was happy with the quality that my students and I experienced with ScreenLeap. But the most wonderful part was the ability of the students to adapt to my last moment adjustment of the plan and support of my efforts with valuable feedback.

2 comments:

  1. wonderful use of technology. I have to check the screenshare out. thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you so much! I hope you find a way to adapt ScreenLeap to fit your needs...then share your findings!

      Delete