New podcast ep: Making web apps at Williston Central

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Vermont middle school educator created app at camp

Vermont middle school educator created app at campIn this episode of our  podcast, we’re going to be hearing from math educator Jared Bailey, who spent his summer vacation building a web app for his students, so they could have their homework assignments, practice drills, schedule and his contact info all in one place. As could their parents.

Bailey’s ethos was simple: he wanted it to be as simple as possible for students and their families to install the app on their mobile devices, and he didn’t want to deal with licensing issues or necessarily learn a ton of code. He just wanted his app to be convenient for students.

So as part of a learning institute this summer called Make Create Learn, Bailey used the App Shed tool to create a web app — that is, an app that can be accessed via a web browser and saved to a mobile device’s home screen. Web apps allow users to not deal with questions of licensing that arise when publishing to the Apple or Google Play Store.

“Scan this QR code to download the Mr. Bailey classroom app”

Vermont educator makes app at summer campStudents can access Bailey’s app by scanning a QR code fixed to the bulletin board outside their classroom. For some of them, the act of scanning a QR code was as novel as seeing their classroom app, and realizing that they could make suggestions for new features that Bailey would implement (as much as possible) overnight.

 

 

You can check out Jared Bailey’s middle school math app here, and follow him on twitter at @jwbvt. You can subscribe to our 21st Century Classroom podcast via Soundcloud, Podomatic or iTunes. The music you hear in this episode is a track by Ellie G called Sampling Anna and is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0.

Audrey Homan

Audrey Homan is a Vermont-based digital media producer, and producer of The 21st Century Classroom podcast. She's worked in non-profit communications for more than a decade, and in her spare time writes tiny video games and mucks about with augmented reality and arduinos, ably assisted by five dogs. Interviewing students and yelling in PHP are the best parts of her job.

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