Today's Free App

Bugsy Kindergarten Reading School is a simple ask and answer app that provides a lot of external motivation for young learners. Children collect stars which build up to earning coins which can be used to buy fun stuff to use in the app. This is a good app for the child who needs extra practice with phonics and will work longer and harder with this kind of app. 

Bugsy Kindergarten Reading School

TinyTap

I came across TinyTap some time ago and could see that it had huge potential in education. I had a play with it but admittedly couldn't get it to do what I wanted. Yesterday my 10 year old daughter was looking at my iPad and spent 5 minutes on the app and managed to create what I was trying for. I quickly swallowed my pride and had her show me how and together we discovered even more features. Turns out it's very easy and I don't know how I missed it but the possibilities, with this app, are limitless. I should mention now that, as with most of my favourite apps, TinyTap is FREE!!

Here are some things you can do:

Games

Create educational games from everyday photos, drawings or text. If you are looking for an app that allows you to differentiate - this is it! This app allows for a personalized and specialized teaching experience for children of all ages and capabilities.

Stories

Tell stories and record questions for each page to keep students involved in the story.

Photo Albums

Organize photos into playable albums and add voice tags.

The basic function of the app is that by adding spoken questions to a photograph and highlighting the answer, touch-screen games can be quickly and effortlessly produced and linked to any subject imaginable. It definitely has amazing potential for students with additional needs as well as students who have English as an additional language or dialect. This is another app that you need to play with to find out just how you could use it. But there is a link below to a YouTube clip that shows how to use it, or you could let your child play and then ask him/her how to do it.

http://youtu.be/klYQ0A2Athc

TinyTap

Today's Free App

Collins Big Book: Around the World Story Creator. Children have several options: have the story read to them, read the story themselves, adapt the images to create their own story.  They can write their own text or record their narrative.  They also have opportunities to add speech bubbles and thought bubbles.  It can be used as a starting point in lessons with younger children to bring reading to life and create interactive books.  There are a few available.
Also search Collins Big Cat: Playing, Collins Big Cat: The Farmer's Lunch, Collins Big Cat: It Was a Cold Dark Night, Collins Big Cat: The Big Steam Train, Collins Big Cat: In the Garden, Collins Big Cat: My Bike Ride and Collins Big Cat: At the Dump

Collins Big Cat: Around the World Story Creator

Edmodo

Edmodo is both an app and a browser based program. It 

is a great source of technology that you can use in the classroom. It is also a great tool to use within iPad workflows.

Here are some tips on how you can incorporate Edmodo into your class. Be aware that this is not even scratching the surface of Edmodo's possibilities. 

• Post up instructional videos
• Give homework/assignment tasks
• Communicate with students and give feedback 
• Post reminders of things they need to do
• Have students collaborate on tasks
• Have students submit assignments
• Give polls and quizzes

Here are some other features of Edmodo:

It can be used for collaboration between staff

Smaller collaborative groups can be made within classes

Official Edmodo communities you can join

You need to sign up initially through the browser version at www.edmodo.com as a Teacher. Then create a class and supply students with a code to join the class. Students also have to sign up as a Student in the browser version.

Today's Free App

 Phonics Silly Sentences provides fun activities that introduce vowel sounds and their letter combinations. The activities will help kids identify short vowels.

Phonics Silly Sentences 1

Today's Free Apps

Grimm's Popup Storybooks are currently free in the App Store. Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots and Hansel and Gretel are all free right now!

Red Riding Hood

Sleeping Beauty

Puss in Boots

Rapunzel

Hansel and Gretel

Publishing with iPads

Vimeo Link: Publishing with iPads

Today's Free App

30 Hands free app is a great storytelling or presentation app that has lots of potential for the classroom.

Presentations can be made with or without audio, but using audio will be more effective in most situations. Once you create your presentation, you can add images from your Camera Roll or you can take a picture with the camera on your device. Multiple images may be selected at once, and can be rearranged in the same way you rearrange apps on your iPad homescreen – press and hold until they wiggle, then drag and drop them to the order you need. You can also draw your slide with the in app sketchpad.

It is a digital storytelling app but it is an equally capable simple presentation app in terms of having students present their content and share their ideas.

You can create similar slideshows to those you can create in SonicPics without the text and with the added ability of adding your own drawings right there in the app. What I particularly like about this app is that you can easily delete and re-record the audio for each slide

You can send finished products to the camera roll.

30 Hands

Today's Free App

Prepare to be amazed. Still trying to find an educational purpose for this app but an excellent introduction to augmented reality.

The app is called colAR Mix - 3D Colouring Book App and basically brings colourings to life in full, animated 3d. You have to use the colouring page templates from the website at www.colarapp.com

- it doesn't work with just any old colouring sheet. Once you have printed the page you colour it in with pencils, markers or crayons of your choice. You then open the app, hit the play button and hold your iPad over the full page colouring and voila!!

YouTube Link

Now at first, I thought "Very cool! But I imagine they have the 3d video overlay embedded into the app and the colouring sheet is the trigger " but what is amazing is that the 3d objects are whatever colour you coloured them. If you coloured the dragon purple with yellow spots - that's what colour it is. I tested this!

The app is free and right now it is free to unlock all pages.

ColAR Mix

Today's Free App - it's a good one

FrameArtist+ is great app that allows students of all ages to present findings digitally. It is similar to Pic Collage but has even more options:

You are unlimited in layout choices

You can even save your own templates 

You can apply filters/ special effects to your photos

There are a huge range of stickers, speech bubbles, background colours and patterns

There are templates to choose from that include Magazine Covers, Newspaper Pages, Postcards

And, as with all of my preferred apps, you can save your creation to the camera roll to be added to a bigger project.

Get it now while it is free!!!!

FrameArtist+

Lesson ideas for Pic Collage

Pic Collage is a fantastic, easy to use app that even very young students could use to present a digital creation. It can the be saved to camera roll and included into a class project such as an iMovie, Book Creator, Keynote etc.

Students combine research and images to create a story collage in the iPad. Students choose a location to research. Students research their chosen location and collect information about the location, when it was created, special geographical features, major attractions and flora and fauna. At KPS this semester the focus would obviously be on the history of the location. Students find 6 different pictures of their chosen Location to illustrate their facts. Students combine their images and facts to create an visually interesting and informative story collage using Pic Collage. See the example below:

More Tellagami

This is how one teacher in NSW used the Tellagami app

Using Tellagami in the Primary Classroom

Persuasive Video

During Literacy Groups, one group read an article about the Mars One program. The article spoke about how the Mars One recruiters were accepting applications for people wishing to start a new colony on Mars. Students were given the task of creating a persuasive application video using tellagami. They were given only one minute to convince recruiters that they were the best choice.

To complete the task students:

• Edited their avatar
• Took a photo to use for their background. Some took a phot from around the school, while others located images on Google and saved them to the photo roll.
• Recorded their application. As Tellagami has a 30 second limit, students recorded their video in two sections and then combined them using iMovie.

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Lesson ideas for using Tellagami

The app opens with a default character and background. You are able to change the way the character looks, where they're standing, and their emotional state. The app lets users set the backgroud either to a photograph on the device, a photo taken at that time, or one of the app's preset backgrounds. In order to generate the audio, the user can record directly into the device, or type text which is then converted to speech by the app. The 'gami' can then be previewed and saved to camera roll.

Emotions:

As Tellagami allows us to change the emotion on the character's face, it can be used to introduce to learners some of the ways the emotional state of the speaker can be expressed. This could involve some analysis of volume, syllable length and pitch of voice. One possible lesson plan to expose students to these concepts could be:

1. Introduce emotions through facial expressions and get students to write them. Play two or three gamis that teacher made earlier and get students to match to the emotion
2. Students discuss whether they think the emotions were clear from the recordings. Which were the easiest emotions to detect and why? Was emotion clear because of words used or how they were said or because of the facial expression?
3. Students listen again and discuss in pairs/groups the characteristics of the different recordings and the emotions they showed.
4. Controlled practice: a neutrally worded sentence is written on the board and students work in pairs to say the sentence with one of the emotions introduced earlier. The student must continue until their partner guesses correctly.
5. Free practice. Students work in pairs to think of a situation that would make them feel one of these emotions. They then pass this situation to a different pair who have to think of what they would say in that situation and record it through Tellagami (they can do one each if there is time).
6. All completed gamis are shared and played to the class. Other groups have to guess the emotion and the situation that has lead them to say what they said.

Functional/Situational Language:

As you can set the background in Tellagami, it works as an interesting way to introduce and practice common functional language and vocabulary related to different situations. This could also be extended to the learners taking photographs of their own situations and thinking about common language used. One possible lesson plan could go like this:

1. Show the learners some of the backgrounds and get them to name the situations (in a cafe, at the office etc.)
2. Students brainstorm the different phrases that they think are common in the different situation.
3. Students are then given 5 minutes for the first situation. They work in pairs to plan what they want the person to say in the situation they're in. When they're ready they record and share.
4. Students then move to the next situation and repeat
5. At the end, the teacher could paste the links to the gamis to a blog, under the headings of the situations
6. Students then have a record of situational language and can comment on the blogpost and add their own ideas later too.

Today's Free App

Phonics Munch Letterstone Park is a pre-reading program which breaks down the very first stage of the reading process into “bite size pieces”, allowing players to master phonics one step at a time and build confidence as they progress. Your child will find it amusing and entertaining to feed Chomper while learning!

Phonics Munch

Today's Free Apps

Find the Shapes HD has colourful pictures and narration and is a simple and engaging way for young students to learn basic shapes.

Find the Shapes

Kindergarten Subtraction uses various visual learning activities to teach subtraction.

Kindergarten Subtraction

An Idea for Reading Comprehension

The browser based version of Wonderopolis is fantastic resource. With the Test your Knowledge section, it becomes a resource for reading comprehension. You can either use the new daily wonder or search through the archive. With each wonder there are word banks, videos, photo galleries, short quizzes and other resources.

Wonderopolis

Today's Free App

What a great app this is. Definitely worth grabbing it while it is free. Students can use this app to virtually travel the globe and learn facts about animal, natural and man-made structures and about countries. It will read the facts to students and there are real photos that could be screenshot and used. The app is called Barefoot Atlas.

Barefoot Atlas

If I haven't convinced you check out the YouTube link:

http://youtu.be/Z55L2xdcOyA

Today's Free App

Old Macdonald Had a Farm by Bacciz Books tells the story with music, sound effects and animations along with some educational games.

Old Macdonald Had a Farm

iPad Accessories

I have posted before about the accessories we use with our iPads at KPS. I thought this time I would go into a bit more detail.

What I consider to be the most important accessories are headphones, speakers and styluses. What we use at KPS are over ear headphones (for hygiene), little burger speakers with 3.5mm jack and basic styluses. When you are buying for a school setting you obviously need to look at some of the less expensive options. I have found all these bought from department stores serve the purpose well and truly. Other options are Bluetooth speakers and headphones. 

When students are working in groups headphones or not always needed but they are a necessity for individuals using iPads in a noisy classroom.

Other accessories I find invaluable are as follows:

• At least one set of microphone headphones. These are perfect for recording audio into books, slide shows etc. They help with students who have quiet voices and for cancelling out background noise. With these you could purchase less expensive in ear ones and just use the microphone, purchase a simple microphone on its own or - my preferred option -  purchase over ear headphones with a microphone attached. The problem with this option is that they usually come with 2 plugs - 1 for the microphone and one for the headphones. An easy solution for this is to purchase a basic 3.5mm Stereo Plug to 2x Stereo Sockets - thus turning 2 plugs into 1.
• A Belkin adaptor to plug 5 sets of headphones into one iPad. (Perfect for an easy listening post).
• A camera connection kit for easy transfer of items from the camera roll to one iPad.
• A VGA adaptor for connecting to the IWB.
• A power board for easy charging in the classroom.

Today's Free Math Apps

Factor Samurai is a great way to learn times tables.

Factor Samurai

Make 10 Puzzle is a math game similar to Sudoku. You tap numbers to remove them until every column and every row totals 10.

Make 10 Puzzle

Today's Free Apps

Ten Giggly Gorillas story book for children is free for today only and has more than 100 interactions and a bonus memory game.

Ten Giggly Gorillas

Paper Camera allows you to choose from a range of 12 fully adjustable effects. These can be applied either before taking the photo or to photos in your camera roll.

Paper Camera