It has been a while since I started this blog and much has changed. I am now back in Muscat at the British School Muscat teaching maths and one year 8 history class. After being used to my  older students having laptops in Brisbane, when I started back at the British School I went through withdrawal. You really get used to the students having technology in the classroom.
   Being a small school in the middle east makes it hard to get the same level of tech support. A few good chats with the IT department and we came up with a plan. The local hyper-market had a Eid sale back in October so several teachers got out their credit cards and went down and we managed to get a set of 24 Samsung Galaxy Tab 4's which were reimbursed through petty cash. This would allow me to have a classroom set to so every student in my classes could have a tablet to use. (My largest class is year 7 top set with 24 students.) Then ICT had to load up the apps I was planning on  using. To start I had them put on the apps for Kahoot, Socrative, Infuse, Desmos and Exit Ticket.
     Then we had to work out the logistics for the classroom. We needed somewhere secure to store the tablets and some way to charge them. I ended up with a cabinet built by the carpenter which was attached to the back wall. The first version didn't have any room for the power boards. That got sorted and there are 4 six outlet power boards in the tablet cabinet.
    We have started small in class and I am only focusing on my year 7,8 and 10 classes as I have these classes the most, six 65 minutes lessons a fortnight. The first lesson learned was getting the devices connected to the Wifi. One of the issues we identified at the start was whether the wifi would hold up with 24 tablets at the same time. It seems the only way to get connected to wifi is to open the browser and the apps for each program won't work unless you have already connected to wifi. This slows things down a bit when we get started. The school wifi login does not always come up the first time you open a web page. This means it can take a few minutes to get all the students logged in and into the program. Many of the students are not used to Android so they are learning their way around the device.
    All the students have been very excited to use the tablets in class and rush in each lesson to get started. On those days I have not planned on using them they are very sad!  The key is to turn this enthusiasm for using tech into maths and learning enthusiasm. These first 3 weeks I have been  just using Socrative space race and Kahoot. I have been keeping the games to 10-15 question games that I  have made myself. While you can use other games already on the sites I find I get exactly what I need for each day's game if I write my own. One of the best resources I have found to get multiple choice questions is Diagnostic Questions. There is a wide variety of very well designed questions designed to diagnose student misunderstandings.
   While the students enjoyed Socrative's space race, they all love Kahoot! They all get into every question and cheer every change in the leader board and moan if they get a question wrong, or even worse, get booted out of the game when the wifi cuts out. (Fortunately this does not happen too much) No matter the topic, I have never seen such enthusiasm. The first question in the door is "Are we doing Kahoot today?" Just the other day we were doing multiplying and dividing decimals as the topic and the enthusiasm and learning going on was beyond what I have ever seen in a classroom. The kids don't want to stop.
   I will finish up for now and talk more about lessons learned and  how I am using the apps next time.