Introducing Pages as a collaborative workbook with Year 11.

This is my tale of my journey into Pages and Classwork. This is a summarised version of a presentation I gave at my school, condensed with the help of Gemini AI.

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Classwork and Pages Workbooks: My Year 11 History Journey

I wanted to share a little narrative about my recent experience transitioning to interactive digital workbooks. I hope it encourages anyone who has been sitting on an ed-tech idea to just take the leap. While you *will* hit obstacles along the way, they aren't insurmountable, and it is absolutely worth pushing on.

This journey isn’t finished—it has its highs and lows—but my students have benefitted immensely. Beyond just learning history, the better they understand the capabilities of these different apps, the more open and supportive they will be when other staff try new digital approaches in the future.

The Backdrop: Moving Beyond "Just Another Word Processor"

I moved to my current school, King’s, in 2023. I came from a school that really wanted to be a digital leader but lacked the required support to make it a reality. I was one of the people leading the drive to get staff and students to engage, working through both a Google phase and a Microsoft stage. Honestly, there isn't a great deal of difference between Google and Microsoft in terms of the standard suite of applications: word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.

When I arrived at King’s, I figured I was just going to be learning yet another suite of the exact same tools, they just happened to be Apple. I confess to looking at Pages, Numbers, and Keynote and thinking, *"I must get round to learning about them, but in the meantime... I’ll stick with what I know."* I really needed my workbooks ready to go for Week 5, and it felt like it would take too long to start them from scratch in Pages. I told myself I'd use it "next time."

I attended our weekly techie brekkie meetings, and each time we did something on Pages, I kept thinking I really needed to look into it. It clearly wasn’t just another Word application, but... you know... time.

The Turning Point: The Apple Learning Coach Course

What really changed things for me was doing the Apple Learning Coach (ALC) course last year. The booklets provided for the course were amazing. We were asked to complete different sections, but then sum up the chapter with a short video clip, a podcast, screenshots, or animations.

By the time I finished, I was buzzing with ideas for how to integrate this multi-modal way of demonstrating understanding with my own students. Pages was no longer a deep, dark mystery; it was something I could easily utilise to make student workbooks incredibly engaging.

My grand idea was to create booklets as beautiful as the ones Apple provided. However, it turns out I am not quite as creative as the instructional designers at Apple! Thankfully, I am a huge fan of the philosophy: "Ugly action beats unfinished perfection."

I kept going, knowing full well that the finished product was going to be a far cry from what I had hoped. And despite them being a bit clunky, I’m genuinely proud of what I’ve given my students this year. It’s a work in progress, but it *is* working.

Transforming Student Engagement

With absolutely no intention of dissing Notability—I think it’s great, and it’s how I deliver course content—it can be limited in terms of active student engagement. Bringing in an interactive Pages workbook takes their daily work to another level.

My students now use their iPads with a split screen:

* **On one side:** They access the digital course material via Notability.

* **On the other side:** They work in their Pages document, deciding for themselves whether to type or handwrite.

They are drawing small diagrams and flowcharts to explain their thoughts, dragging icons onto graphs, and using Keynote to create GIFs showing threats to the Weimar Republic, which they then insert directly into Pages. If a task exists in the course material, they screenshot it and drop it straight into the workbook. They are constantly choosing whether to write, type, speak, or draw. This flexibility encourages them to play to their strengths, and hopefully, they'll start using these skills in other subjects too.

The "60-Second Summary"

Every few pages, they are given the opportunity to record a audio summary of the last few pages of work. I introduced this for several reasons:

1. **Authentic Understanding:** It stops students from simply copying, pasting, or quoting the course content.

2. **AI Protection:** When listening to the recordings, it’s glaringly obvious who is speaking naturally and who is reading an AI-generated script.

3. **Time Management:** The "60 seconds" constraint came about because some students initially loved this so much that their early recordings were over five minutes long! While it was great to hear them go to town on the topic, it took me forever to mark. By asking them to condense it into a single minute, they really have to engage with the content, prioritize the core points, and think about how to say things succinctly.

One of my favorite recordings was from a student trying to explain the motivations of the Big Three at the Treaty of Versailles; he openly admitted in the audio that he found one of them really hard to get a handle on. Another student, when talking about the economic impact of the Treaty, said: *"The Germans were really p***ed — er, angry — with the negative impact."* I loved this. It was funny, but it also showed a genuine, solid understanding of how those historical figures actually felt. Allowing students to express their learning without the restrictions of grammar or spelling means they are much more expressive. It is particularly brilliant for those who find written literacy challenging. Where they might try to write as little as possible for a written response, the audio gives them the opportunity to really express themselves.

Solving the Workflow and Submission Logistics

The lessons were going well, the students were engaged, and I was thrilled with my first venture into interactive workbooks. The main issue quickly became: **how do we get the work submitted?**

Our history department uses the Showbie app. Initially, it looked like a lot of the interactive media elements got lost when the Pages document was uploaded. We bypassed this by having me open the original file directly into Pages on my end. This allowed me to see all their work, hear their audio recordings, and make my own digital comments and annotations.

However, the next obstacle appeared when I would have a consecutive lesson with a class before I’d had a chance to mark and return their previous submission. We started getting version overlap. It didn’t take long for several versions to be flying back and forth, meaning comments I made on one version weren't visible to the student working on a later version. We tried using live collaboration links instead of file sharing, but some students struggled to connect properly, and it was the kind of system that really needed to be all-or-nothing to work effectively.

This was when we moved the class onto the **Apple Classwork** app. By uploading the template file to Classwork, students access the file directly through the platform. Now, I can see their live progress instantly and even monitor how much time they are spending on the document. It has streamlined the entire marking workflow.

Where Next?

My immediate plan is to complete a full set of these workbooks for the entire academic year so that I have a solid baseline to build on. From there, I’m hoping to roll it out to follow this current Year 11 cohort into their Year 12 History lessons, while reusing and refining the Year 11 templates with next year’s group.

Along the way, I’ll keep tweaking, changing, and improving the design, but for now, I'm sticking to the motto: *ugly action beats unfinished perfection.*