New podcast ep: Making web apps at Williston Central

Vermont middle school educator created app at camp

In 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”

Students 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.