Friday 18 July 2014

My New Favourite App

From what I can work out this App came out earlier this year and I can't believe it has taken me this long to find it. I must have been napping.

Basically it is an iPad app in which you can create animated videos from photos. Nothing new there - we have SonicPics and Animoto (that I still love) but this one is beyond simple! You can choose from thousands and thousands of Creative Commons and public domain still images or you can use your own, it offers eight different story structures with prompts and ideas or you can just go for it, there are five different layouts for your photos, there are 32 different and wonderful themes, there 37 instrumental tracks to set the right mood and video hosting is built in for easy sharing as your finished masterpiece can be viewed an a phone, tablet, computer, etc. You can make your videos private or public and I am sure you would be able to link them to a QR code although I haven't tried this yet - I was too excited about sharing the app.

You just add photos and talk your story and the app makes it all look and sound amazing! Have I convinced you yet? Do you want to know the name of the App so you can grab your iPad and download it immediately? That's what I thought. The App is called Adobe Voice and it is FREE!


Monday 14 July 2014

Blended Learning

In preparation for our BYOD trial next year, I have been thinking about some of the many blended learning tools that are already useful with a shared model but will be even more useful for a 1:1environment.
The following tools are basically Learning Management Systems - you would need to select one of these to use for the whole class:

Edmodo is an educational website that is sort of a cross between a social network and a learning management system. Using Edmodo, students and teachers can reach out to one another and connect by sharing ideas, problems, and helpful tips.The Edmodo interface resembles Facebook, which makes it instantly popular with students! Edmodo can be implemented by a single teacher for their class, with no technical expertise required to get started.Once you have created a class (or a school) you can invite students and other teachers to join the class by providing a unique code for that class. (It is worth keeping an eye on enrolments to ensure that students are enrolling as ‘students’, not ‘teachers’.) Each student has a unique ‘Parent code’ that can be provided to parents to view only their child’s assignments and contributions to discussions.

 Schoology leans a little more towards being a LMS than Edmodo while maintaining an easy-to-use ‘social network’ interface. Schoology can be implemented by a single teacher for their class, with no specialist technical expertise required to get started. Sign-up, and away you go. As a teacher (or, as Schoology describes you, an Instructor) you create Courses, add materials to the courses – assignments, quizzes, files and links, discussions, photo albums and web pages. Schoology also provides a Gradebook, which is auto-populated with Assignments and Quizzes that you have created for a course. Schoology includes an Analytics feature, where you can check student participation in Assignments, Discussions, and their use of provided course web links.

Classroom is a new tool coming to Google Apps for Education. Classroom will weave together Google Docs, Drive and Gmail to help teachers create and organise assignments quickly, provide feedback efficiently, and communicate with their classes with ease. It will let students organise their work, complete and turn it in, and communicate directly with their teachers and peers. Classroom automatically will create Drive folders for each assignment and for each student. Students will easily see what’s due on their Assignments page, so they can stay on top of their work. Classroom will also let teachers make announcements and start discussions—improving communication inside and outside of class.

The following tools are options for presenting lessons and assessing:

Showbie is a FREE app that can be used to create and collect assignments right from the iPad. You create a free teacher account and you are able to create classes within the app. You receive a code for each class for your students to connect with. It is like a drop box for the classroom. Using Showbie, students can submit pictures, video, podcasts, presentations and other work from hundreds of apps into their Showbie online assignment folder. Teachers use the Showbie iPad app to easily review students’ work and provide rich feedback with annotations and voicenotes.  

Nearpod allows teachers to construct presentations using the Nearpod website and deliver instruction to students by pushing content out to multiple devices at once.  The teacher can control the presentation from a master iOS device, while students follow along on a class set of iPads. To enliven instruction, teachers can also embed multiple choice questions, polls, videos, quizzes, open-ended questions, and web-links in their presentations. It is also possible to pay for a gold membership so that lesson can be presented in a way that let's students work at their own pace or for homework.

Blendspace is an online multimedia Web tool for teachers and students to create presentations, WebQuests, projects, online courses and more! Blendspace is integrated with Edmodo and, in your lessons, you can pull resources from YouTube, Dropbox, Google Drive, Flickr, Website Links, My Computer, Bookmarks and more! Multiple choice questions can be embedded into lessons.

Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers by engaging their classrooms with a series of educational exercises and games. Our apps are super simple and take seconds to login. Socrative runs on tablets, smartphones, and laptops.

Saturday 12 July 2014

ThingLink

I came across this app a long time ago and I could see huge potential but I didn't really have a chance to have a proper play. I have now had a bit of a play and I love it. What a great way for students to present a report - about anything at all! You can add web links, text, links to youtube clips just from an image. What is even better is it is web based so can be shared so easily.

The one I have pasted below is a quick muck up of the type of thing you might get students to create - but with much more research and more links and facts. I created my image in PicCollage, saved it to my camera roll and accessed it through the ThingLink app. It took me a total of 30 minutes and the app is so easy to use.

Animals of the Amazon

Friday 11 July 2014

Game Making on iPads

As the way I use iPads has evolved over the past couple of years I find that I most value the iPad as a tool for  personalising learning, for assessment and for collecting evidence of student achievements and for promoting student creativity. For these purposes apps such as Edmodo and Nearpod are invaluable for personalising learning and apps such as Book Creator are invaluable for collecting evidence and artefacts and apps such as iMovie, PuppetPals, GreenScreen, Tellagami are excellent for student creativity. For assessment, their are so many options such as apps that collect data when students sign in, taking screenshots of students' results on an app and using screen casting apps like Educreations and Explain Everything to record students' understanding of various concepts.

My favourite way to assess is to have students create games for other students to use. This way games are created that are relevant to the content being taught in your classroom and you will see from how well the game is created, how well the student understands the topic. TinyTap has been (and still is) one of my favourite apps to use for this purpose. The only problem is the games are not editable so if students do make a mistake when they create their game, while you can still use this to assess their understanding, they then need to remake the entire game for it to be useful. I recently discovered another excellent app that can be used for this purpose.

StickAround, unlike many of my other favourite apps, is not free but it is well worth its $3.79. It is available on Apple's Volume Purchasing Program which takes is back to $1.90 if you purchase over 20 copies. I won't go into details about how StickAround works because there is a great deal of information on the website at www.learninginhand.com/stickaround. The website contains video tutorials, user guides, a blog and more. Basically you use StickAround to create puzzles on any topic. Some suggestions they make on the website are:

  • place locations on a map
  • tag parts of the body
  • place items where they belong on a chart
  • complete a graphic organizer
  • annotate the water cycle
  • label people in a photo
  • diagram a sentence
  • associate powers with the branches of government
  • sequence events on a timeline
  • associate words and definitions
  • label the parts of a plant
  • put words in alphabetical order
  • fill in a Venn diagram
  • match photos of animals to their habitats
What a great way to assess student understanding! These puzzles are fully editable from the project page so, if students do misunderstand the concept, their games can then be fixed. Once completed and repaired, puzzles can be saved to non-editable versions and they can be shared using GoogleDrive.

Obviously TinyTap and StickAround are also more than excellent for creating personalised games/puzzles for students to play.