Even our youngest students can be engaged in researching topics of interest on the internet. The stigma of ‘digital natives’ rears its ugly head (once again!) as a massive disservice to our kids. Although our students might reign supreme on YouTube and Minecraft, it doesn’t mean they have the innate research skills that will have them breaking earth-shattering headlines by lunchtime. 

As with any new skill, students need to observe teachers modeling how to research. This might include:

• brainstorming questions around a topic
• listing key terms or search phrases that would filter to the correct information
• evaluating and vetting websites
• how to curate resources and collect notes

 With so many skills involved in researching, make sure to take your time and help students build skills. Unleashing a class onto 'the Googles' to scour for information could be ineffective, frustrating, and possibly even disastrous.

Over the years, I’ve collected a few little tips and tricks that might be helpful in this process.

• Use a curation tool for your students. The internet is full of information. And although we should teach our students how to evaluate and curate their own resources, it is highly beneficial for students to have a list of resources the teacher has vetted for them. A great tool for this is Wakelet. It creates a visual board of resources that is easy to navigate. Even a list of resources on a Google Doc will help your students get started. For an even better experience, model for your students how and why you chose a few of those resources.
• So, you want them to use a search engine. There are some ‘kid-safe’ search engines out there, but don’t trust them with your life. Always have a plan in place for students if they come across content that makes them feel uncomfortable or unsafe. ALWAYS. Be proactive, not reactive. Make sure parents are aware of this plan too. It will prove to be worth its weight in gold. Just trust me on this one.
• Consider the reading level of your students. There might be a huge amount of information out there on the topic, but does the material match your students’ reading levels? Using a free tool like Rewordify can help simplify the complexity of the text, but it’s not perfect and shouldn’t be used to completely solve the problem of unsuitable reading materials. Other tools such as Tween Tribune, Newsela, ReadWorks, and GWAEA’s Online Resources, such as BritannicaOnline, allow students and teachers to choose from a range of reading levels. 
• Listening comprehension is usually higher than reading comprehension. Mobile devices usually have a text-to-speech accessibility feature built-in (iPad or Android), but other devices might need a little boost. Chrome extensions like Announcify and Select and Speak let students listen to the text. Both these extensions have a less robot-like voice and have proven to work pretty well for me. Yet again, see GWAEA’s Online Resources, Unite for Literacy, or Wonderopolis for built-in text-to-speech features.
• Take away the clutter. Websites can be distracting and busy. Help students remove some of the visual noise by using Safari’s Reader View on the iPad or by installing the Chrome Extension Reader View or Mercury Reader. Both of these do a great job of cleaning up and isolating the text to help all readers focus on the task at hand.
• Ask your teacher librarian for help. The end. ​

Researching is a skill that students will circle back to time and time again throughout their life. It’s much like riding a bike. It brings a certain amount of freedom, but can also end in a skinned knee. It is not an innate skill. It needs to be modeled, taught, supported, and revisited many times during the year. But by building solid foundational skills, researching is one of the greatest skills you will ever give your students.


~Mindy Cairney

Apple’s latest software release saw a small divergence for iPhone and iPad. Although they both run a version of iOS, the iPad variation is now called iPadOS. This is because of the increasing number of iOS features that only work on an iPad. Here are some of my favorite additions to the new iPadOS as well as a quick guide on how to enable them.

The new iPad home screen includes a sidebar of widgets and an increased number of app icons. The scrollable list of widgets can be customized to include updates from all your favorite apps, and the day and date is displayed above them for a nice, clean look. If 30 apps on one screen is too many for you, head over to Settings > Display & Brightness where you can revert to the previous configuration of 20 apps, but more apps on one screen should mean less swiping, and maybe less hunting around for the one you need.

In iPadOS, Apple upgraded the Safari browser so that it performs much more like the browser on your laptop. This means you will no longer see the mobile version of webpages like YouTube or Google Docs. It’s not perfect, but if you or your students are feeling hamstrung by the lack of features in some of Google’s iPad apps, you can get the full web experience when you use Safari, and you won’t have to request the desktop version because you get that by default. Live collaboration, Add-ons, and just about everything else works just as it should. There is also a download manager that makes downloading video and audio from the web quick and easy!

If you’ve ever longed for mouse support on the iPad, then the time has finally come. Apple included it as an accessibility feature for those who have difficulty interacting with a touch screen.  It allows you to connect a Bluetooth or USB mouse to control a cursor and navigate your iPad hands-free. It is also great for making instructional videos when students can’t see where you are tapping on the screen.

To get started, go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > and turn on Assistive Touch. Then go to Devices and configure your mouse to work the way you want. You can assign different actions to each button on your mouse. The cursor size, speed and color can also be adjusted to your liking.

There is a new screenshot tool in iPadOS that includes some new markup tools, as well as the ability to take a scrolling screenshot of a webpage. Simply invoke the screenshot tool by pressing and holding the home button and the power button, then tap the thumbnail in the corner to get started. You can save a screenshot as an image, or as a PDF by tapping Done in the top left-hand corner.

You can now add multiple apps to Slide Over by dragging and dropping an app from the dock onto an existing Slide Over app. You can switch between these apps the same way you do on your iPhone by swiping up from the home indicator at the bottom of the stack. For even more flexibility, power users will be glad to hear that you can also open more than one instance of the same app. This means you can have Notes and Safari open in Split View in one window, and have Notes and YouTube open in another window. With practice, this can make you more productive than ever on an iPad.

Are you ready to take a trip to the dark side? Turn on dark mode in Settings > Display and Brightness to make the switch, or do what I do and have it turn on and off automatically at sunset and sunrise. Not apps support dark mode yet, but an increasing number do and this can make it easier on your eyes when you are catching up on school emails on your iPad at night.

Remember when you used to be able to split your iPad keyboard in two for thumb-typing mastery? That feature is no longer there, but if you pinch the iPadOS keyboard with two fingers you can shrinking it down to an iPhone-sized keyboard and use swipe-to-type to enter your text. You can drag the smaller keyboard anywhere on the screen. This is perfect for quick text adjustments or for times when you don’t want the iPad keyboard to cover important areas of the screen. Bonus tip: You can use QuickType on your iPhone with iOS 13.

These are a few of the features that I have been enjoying from iPadOS when I was using the public beta this summer. If you are interested in finding out about the rest of the iPadOS features, make sure you check out Apple’s website for the full coverage. iPadOS can be installed on an iPad Air 2 or newer.

Jonathan Wylie
Digital Learning Consultant
Grant Wood AEA