In the left corner, we have the iPad: sleek, engaging, and fun to use.  In the right corner, we have the school laptops: bulky, slower, but more familiar.  Which will come out on top for our next lesson on grammar? Let’s look at the reel, shall we?

I was excited to use this new website I found from my teacher friends on Edmodo called NoRedInk.com.  If you’ve never heard of it before, go check it out! Basically, students can sign up for a free account and join your class after you create one.  When they create their accounts, the site asks them to choose three things that interest them, ranging from actors, movies, music, even inputting their own friends’ and pet’s names.  You, as the teacher, can choose from different areas of focus to assign your students.  For example, there is the apostrophes option, which focuses on the correct use of apostrophes in sentences.  The site will give students a sentence in either correct, or incorrect format.  If it’s correct, they hit “Submit” and go onto the next question.  If there’s a correction, they click on the part of the sentence that needs correcting and fix it.  A table located above their sentence shows the progress they’ve made and which questions they’ve answered correctly after a certain number of attempts.

What’s great about this site is that students can actually click (or tap, if using the iPad) the sentences and modify them.  Also, the website incorporates their interests that they chose when they signed up and uses those things in their sentences.  For example, my student entered “Rocky” as his pet name.  On question 4, his sentence mentioned Rocky as the subject.  He gave a little squeal and *gasp* even a small smile when he worked on this sentence.  If the students are working with punctuation (commas, colons, semi-colons, etc), you can click or tap the correct punctuation and drag it over to where it belongs in the sentence.

So, back to our lesson.  I posted the link on our classroom’s Edmodo page and had the students use their iPads to practice their grammar.  Not the best idea I’ve ever had.  While the iPad is more engaging for the students, clicking and dragging the various punctuation marks to the correct location in the sentence proved to be a hassle.  Most of the time, students had to attempt several times clicking and dragging.  It was enough to mildly frustrate some of the students.  And we all know, we cannot afford to “lose” our students in a lesson and have them check out due to an incompatibility with the technology.  The laptops, even though they are sooo last year, would’ve been a better idea to use for this website.  It really would’ve saved a lot of time, and my guess is the students would’ve enjoyed it more.

The moral of the story (for me, at least) is don’t completely abandon what you’ve used in the past if it works just because you have something new to use now (in this case, the iPads).  I’ve been so gung-ho on using the iPads for as much as possible, I think I was in denial with the fact that maybe the iPads weren’t the right choice every single time.  Laptops won this fight.

Lesson learned.