Blog Archives

Differentiate instruction with these fun apps

4/15/2015

ThingLink

Students can use ThingLink to make interactive reports, digital portfolios, tagged maps, learning summaries, interactive book talks, talking artwork, history projects, study guides, and much more. Students can add tags to images using ThingLink. Tags can be web links, comments, photos, or videos. ThingLink is a free iPad app and it’s also a website. Saving a ThingLink project requires an account because saved projects are posted on ThingLink.com. ThingLink.com provides embed code so you can showcase projects on your own website.

Videolicious

Students can make documentary and news segment style films with Videolicious Students can record themselves giving a short introduction and then easily cut to a series of images and videos. The filming can return back to the student who can then record a short conclusion. The free version of Videolicious has a time limit of 60 seconds. The time constraint can actually push students to include only the most important or interesting details.

Stick Around

Pic Collage

Students turn what they know into a puzzle with the Stick Around app. Puzzles are made in three steps:

Use drawing tools and/or import photos to make a background.
Add stickers with text, images, and or drawings.
Indicate where stickers belong by making an answer key.

Puzzles are played by dragging the stickers from the tray on the right side of the screen onto the correct spot on the background. Types of puzzles that can be made include sorting, categorizing, labeling, and matching. Puzzles can be played on the same iPad, and they can also be shared to other iPads that have Stick Around installed. Since the end product is a game, students keep their audience in mind as they craft and test their puzzles.

Use PicCollage to combine photos, YouTube videos, funky fonts, sassy stickers and cute cutouts to create the prettiest collages you'll ever see on a mobile device. This would be a great substitution for project boards and PowerPoint presentations, and could eliminate cutting and pasting on poster boards.

Haiku Deck

Book Creator

Whether it's a breakthrough business idea, a photo slideshow for your blog, or a mini manifesto, we know you have amazing stories to tell and ideas to share. Haiku Deck helps you find your creative flow. With Haiku Deck, we set out to reimagine the experience of creating and sharing presentations. We wanted to make it incredibly simple for anyone to produce flawlessly beautiful slides, with minimal time and effort. We took a mobile-first approach to ensure that content creation on the iPad would be both practical and elegant.

Puppet Pals HD

Puppet Pals HD offers an easy way for kids to create and record their own storytelling scenes and develop fun voice-acting skills. Simply tap "Press to Start" and choose up to eight themed, move-able sticker-like characters from the available theme packs (in-app purchase required for most). Next, select up to five backgrounds. Swipe and pinch to place, resize, and move the characters within the background. Tap to record audio or swap backgrounds, then save and give the performance a title. Puppet Pals can be incorporated into classroom lessons about about history, current events, science, storytelling, literary genres, and more.

Add your text, images, video, music and
narration and use all of your content
to tell the whole story. A great book deserves to be read. Share your books with friends and family in the way that
suits you. You can also post pages from your book to
Facebook and Twitter and show everyone what
you're working on.
http://www.redjumper.net/bookcreator/

-Stacey J. Dudzinski

Six emerging technologies in education

4/14/2015

Clouding

Using web-based tools, students and educators can collaborate online. One of the biggest attractions of cloud computing is that it is saving schools money and resources. (i.e. paper, ink, books)

Open Content

This technology has evolved away from the idea of authoritative repositories of content and towards the broader notion of content being both free and ubiquitous. Schools are beginning to feel a social responsibility to create and share their content.

Gaming

The productive role of gaming allows for experimentation, the exploration of identities, and even failure. For example, a high school is using a web-based game show format in their language arts program.

Learning Analytics

Use of learning analytics to help educators design systems and approaches to better measure student outcomes and faculty development are on the horizon. It can lead to new ways of thinking and new technologies to track, visualize, and mine data.

Mobile Technologies

Mobile technology: K-12 schools are increasingly seeing the potential of mobile devices - and noting that not only are the devices themselves less expensive than laptops, they need less infrastructure to support them.

Personal Learning Environments

This is an approach or process that is individualized by design, and thus different from person-to-person. This allows the teacher to differentiate instruction even more, leaving the students with more choices in assessment.

- Stacey J. Dudzinski

Alternative verbiage for SAMR

4/13/2015

Here is an alternative way to incorporate Bloom's Taxonomy combined with technology in your classroom. TECH (Traditional, Enhanced, Choice, Handoff) complements the SAMR (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition) model, with Traditional being lower level and with Handoff being a higher level of learning, but with emphasis on students and teachers, and not merely tasks.
- Stacey Dudzinski

Online Discussion Boards

4/12/2015

Online discussions can be an effective way to teach and assess student learning. Some of the benefits of using online discussions include:
*Teachers spend less time answering questions
*Students develop a stronger class community
*Students participate more regularly and in a more thoughtful manner than they would normally do in a face-to-face instructional setting
*Students are more likely to cite research and class readings
*Empowers students to express themselves.
*Students are more likely to utilize critical thinking skills

Before you dive into using online discussions make sure your students have an understanding of the basic guidelines, rules, and assessment practices.

Uses for online discussion boards include:
-Ask the experts -Debates
-Polling -Roll Playing
-Peer Review -Current Events
-Literature Circles -Collaborative Writing
-Virtual Field Trip -Backchannel during video
-"Real life" examples

There are many methods for assessing online discussions. Below are a few sample rubrics.

Below you will find the presentation I created for a professional development class on the use of online discussion boards.

-Michelle Bothel

10 iPad Apps for English Language Learners

4/9/2015

Check out these apps for English Language Learners. Many would be appropriate for ELA teachers as well.
-Michelle Bothel

Teaching vs. Tools

4/9/2015

I heard a quote the other day, "The phone your students are using now will be the most obsolete device they will ever have." Interesting to think about. We work so hard trying to provide students the latest and greatest but the truth is technology moves so fast we can not possibly provide them with the most current technology available. This presents us with a dilemma. We can train teachers to work the newest devices and navigate the most up-to-date software but this cycle is never ending. Professional development on a single program or device is not worth our teachers' time. Instead we should not focus on the tool, but the teaching. How can we affect pedagogy no matter which tool we use? There are hundreds of programs for creating a blended learning course, most with only slight variations. Let's show teachers the fundamentals of what makes an instructionally sound blended class and let them use the help button to find out where the calendar is. What ever 21st century teaching model we are presenting: flipped classroom, online discussions, project based learning, gamification, interdisciplinary learning, etc. we should focus on the pedagogy not the product. The tools change day to day but good teaching practices remain for years to come.
-Michelle Bothel

Differentiate instruction with these fun apps

ThingLink

Videolicious

Stick Around

Pic Collage

Haiku Deck

Book Creator

Puppet Pals HD

Six emerging technologies in education

Clouding

Open Content

Gaming

Learning Analytics

Mobile Technologies

Personal Learning Environments

Alternative verbiage for SAMR

Online Discussion Boards

10 iPad Apps for English Language Learners

Teaching vs. Tools

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