Anybody Can Learn!

I am excited about the possibilities of participation in the Hour of Code by students in all grades and schools in our district.  Last year I saw first hand how students were enthused, inspired, and rewarded by the opportunity to practice computer programming using iPad apps and the online tools suggested by www.code.org.  This year the "Hour" has been stretched to an entire week, December 8 - 14, 2014, in hopes that 100 million students around the world will experience coding...an ambitious goal, but given the tremedous support and excellent resources provided by Code.org, it's possible.  Educatators and students register now at www.code.org.  Be sure to watch the videos.  They are truly inspirational!

Unite for Literacy

With a goal of eventually including audio translations in 300 different languages, Unite For Literacy is more than just a source for online books. Committed to promoting literacy by providing books to children's' homes in Colorado, the organization launched its digital picture book library August 2013, allowing anyone with Internet access to choose from UFL’s more than 100 free e-books,.

Unlike other available e-book libraries, Unite for LIteracy books don’t require registration, downloading, or extensive searching through categories. The virtual books look like print versions with clean two-page spreads and pages that can be "turned" on a computer or any mobile device.  Each page is illustrated and includes an audio narration .

Unite for Literacy can be a great resouce for early elementary classrooms, especially in some of the first grade classrooms in the Acton-Boxborough district, where iPads are used for listening centers.  Add a shortcut to Unite for Literacy to the Home Screen, and students have instant access to quality audio-visual picture books!  Audio translations of the books are available in up to 17 languages so far, so Unite for Literacy is also ideal for ELL students.

iPad Apps for Creating eBooks

There are many different storytelling apps available for iPads that support literacy goals and encourage creative storytelling. Here are a few that I think are especially good for students to create and publish their own ebooks.

MyStory is no longer a free app, but I think it's worth the $3.99 price.  Unlike similar book creation apps, MyStory works really well in classrooms with shared iPads because teachers can easily set up multiple students as "authors." Each author can create and save multiple books, which can be shared directly in the MyStory app, opened on the iPad in iBooks, or with a hyperlink. Check out my MyStory here.

StoryPatch is a free app that guides students to build a story that includes storytelling elements such as theme, plot, and scene. When students use StoryPatch to create a story, they are given two initial choices: write a story without any help, or choose a theme to build a story with help. If they choose to get help, the app walks them through the storytelling process, giving choices for the type of story and plot developments. The script is provided, but students can freely edit any of the text, and add images. StoryPatch would be a great choice for teaching students about the elements of storytelling, and for students who have "writer's block," and can benefit from the prompts and pre-written storylines. Unlike the other storytelling apps reviewed in this post, StoryPatch does not allow audio recording. Completed stories can be read through the StoryPatch app, or shared as pdf files.

Toontastic is another great app for teaching students about the storytelling process. As they create their animated story, students are guided by the "Story Arc," which gives voice prompts for the elements of good storytelling: Setup, Conflict, Challenge, Climax, and Resolution. Students can draw their own scenes, choose from a library of scenes, or access the iPad camera roll. They also have a limited selection of characters and "toys." Instead of writing their story, students record their voices. What makes this app really compelling is the ability to animate the characters. While recording audio, students can use their fingers to make their characters move. Another plus is that Toontastic stories can be published on the ToonTube website, which provides a safe, kid-friendly forum for sharing their work. The basic app is free; The $14.99 version will unlock the "All Access Pass" that provides 200 characters, settings, and other add-ons.

BookCreator has quickly become the most popular eBook app at Blanchard Memorial School. Students and teachers extol its benefits, primarily because it is easy to use and produces professional-quality books that can be read on the iPad, and exported as a PDF or an ePub for viewing in iBooks. BookCreator projects can incorporate videos, photos and other images from the iPad Camera Roll, audio recordings, and text. Students love reading their published books in iBooks, where they can select their book from the shelf and turn pages with the swipe of a finger. This video demonstrates just how easy it is to use BookCreator. It can be used for any subject and is ideal for students of all ages. Even our preschool students have created and published with BookCreator!  BookCreator is available for $4.99 in the Apps store, with a discount for volume purchases.


Book Creator for the iPad from Book Creator on Vimeo.

Favorite iPad Apps for Video Presentations

There are so many great, and often free, iPad apps that students can use to create video presentations.  Here is a ThingLink (see more about ThingLink in an earlier post), with links to three videos explaining how students can use three of my favorite video creation apps.
Videos saved to the iPad Camera Roll can easily be saved to Vimeo, a safer, educationally-appropriate alternative to YouTube.

Safely Share YouTube Videos with Safe Share TV

YouTube can be a tremendous resource for educational videos, but the content is risky to share with students, due to potentially inappropriate commentary or related videos.  Luckily there is a free and easy-to-use solution with SafeShare TV. Teachers can search for videos on YouTube, and then copy and paste the video link to www.safeshare.tv to generate a safe link, which they can then freely share with students for access without going to YouTube.  Here's a video of Shel Silverstein himself reading this book, The Giving Tree, embedded YouTube, and (below) copied to SafeShare for student viewing.


On Safe Share: The Actual '73 Giving Tree Movie Spoken By Shel Silverstein

Avatars

There are almost as many ways to create free avatars as there are reasons to do so. Students love creating digitized versions of themselves for online communications and websites, including social networking sites like Edmodo, and digital storytelling sites like VoiceThread. In addition to encouraging creativity and technology skills, the use of customized avatars helps protect student privacy. Instead of posing recognizable photos of themselves, students can use photo editing sites to modify their pictures in a variety of creative and artistic ways, or they can create a digitized avatar that resembles an Anime character, a Lego person, or a range of other themes. Here are a few of my favorite choices for creating avatars:
With Voki,students can create customized avatars that speak. Voki allows you to record your own voice, or type text that will be converted to speech in a choice of more than 25 languages and accents. There are a variety of features for customizing the look of Voki avatars and backgrounds. Voki is free, and easy to use; I created my Voki in less than 5 minutes. Click the play button to hear my Voki talk!
Picture yourself in plastic with the Lego Mini-Mizer. Just like with real Legos, you can choose from a variety of heads, hair, hats, torsos, arms, legs and accessories. I couldn't resist giving myself a cape and a mini iPad to hold.
PicassoHead provides features made famous by Picasso that you can use for creating an avatar that Picasso himself might approve. This would be an interesting tool for students to use in art class while learning about the work of the artist and exploring their own creativity. Once you create your own avatar, you can save it to the gallery, and browse to the other creations.
Clay Yourself: Students would enjoy exploring the possibilities of claymation with this interactive tool sponsored by Hotels.com. The interface is engaging and easy to use. The site also includes a "stage name" generator and a script generator tool, so that users can create a brief script that includes fill-in-the-blank words (similar to Mad Libs) and then use the built-in audio feature to record the script for their clay character.
Free Photo Editing Sites provide other alternatives for students to create avatars, based on photos of themselves. Two websites that I like are FotoFlexer and BeFunky. I used FotoFlexer to 'cartoonize' my picture on this blog (under About Me). In collaboration with art teacher extraordinaire Eileen Barnett at Blanchard Memorial School, our 6th-grade students had a great time adding artistic effects and other gadgets to their photos with BeFunky. They printed their "funkified" portraits for a weaving project in art class, and saved a 'funky' avatar to upload to their VoiceThread account. My avatar here was created on BeFunky by appying the Pointillism effect, and adding one of the selection of frames.

Digital Learning Day

Teachers and students at our school enthusiastically participated in the second annual Digital Learning Day, a nation-wide initiative to promote and celebrate the use of instructional technologies. We joined nearly 25,000 teachers and millions of students across the country in an effort to recognize successful digital learning practices. Digital learning is changing education in powerful ways, and the benefits are obvious: when given access to digital tools, our students exhibit higher levels of engagement and demonstrate the ability to access information, create, think critically and communicate globally. This collage represents just some of the digital learning happening at our school on February 6, 2013, which is not much different from the digital learning that happens here every day!

Assessment Tools for 21st Century Teaching

Finding time and efficient ways to assess students is one challenge for classroom teachers that can be eased with technology. There are numerous online assessment tools and iPad apps specifically designed to help educators meet Common Core Standards, track student progress, facilitate grading, monitor student behavior, and generate reports. Many of them are available for a free trial period, or as free basic versions (typically with a cost for upgrading to premium levels).

Mastery Connectt is a promising assessment tool available both online, and as an iPad app. Once you register for the free version, you can specify the standards you choose to track, including Common Core and any state standards. The free version provides tools for creating assessments, and for collaborating with other teachers, either in your school or with any teachers in the Mastery Connect community. The formative assessments and mastery tracking tools are easy to use, and the video tutorials and sample assessments can help you quickly get started. The ability to track skill mastery based on specific standards is impressive, and will be more so as the library of assessments is built by contributions from other teachers. While you can search for assessment to upload, you may find that you need to create your own until the Mastery Connect community becomes more active. Watch this NutShell video for an overview of Mastery Connect:

Socrative is an excellent formative assessment tool that can be used with students on iPads or any Internet-connected device. After signing up for a free teacher account,teachers can create or import quizzes (either multiple choice or short answer). Socrative generates a "room number," which students enter from the student version of the Socrative website or app. Once the teacher starts a quiz, students are able to take the assessment, and teachers can instantly see and graphically display the results. Socrative accomplishes the same results as hand-held clicker devices, such as the SMART Senteos, in a much easier and more cost-effective way.

Quia is full-featured online assessment website that provides a variety of tools, including templates for creating 16 types of assessments, tools for creating and grading quizzes, and access to millions of previously created online activities. Quia charges a subscription fee, but you can try if for free for 30 days.

Class DoJo is online behavior management software that can also be downloaded as an iPad app. The software is designed to help teachers improve student conduct and engagement by recording specific behaviors and generating awards for good behavior. Students tend to be motivated by the fun interface and immediate feedback.

iWorksheet is a free iPad app that provides a very simple way to administer multiple choice assessments. Teachers can add easily add worksheets to the app by snapping a picture of a paper worksheet with the iPad camera. Once worksheets are added they can be saved for easy retrieval. At this point iWorksheet only supports multiple-choice assessments, but I expect that features will be expanded in the future.

Blubbr is in beta, so may not be quite ready for prime time, but it looks like it might be a very engaging classroom assessment tool. The website allows you to create and play trivia games based on YouTube clips. There are now over 150 existing video-based trivia games in Blubbr's Education category, covering subjects such as the solar system, American presidents, and how to write a good essay. You can check it out (and check your musical knowledge) by playing the Peter and the Wolf Quiz. I think the best feature of Blubbr is that you can create and share your own trivia games. This is an assessment tool that you and your students can have some fun with!

What Does it Mean to Teach in the 21st Century?

This presentation compiling the big ideas of leaders in instructional technology perfectly summarizes what it means to effectively teach students today. With information a click away, the role of teachers has shifted. We have a big responsibility to engage students with digital tools, and help them learn to filter information effectively and responsibly. As the presentation suggests, teachers can start small: choose one thing to add to your next unit to better engage students with 21st century tools.

Math Live

MathLive is an educationally-sound, completely full-featured online tool that can help introduce math concepts and encourage problem-solving skills. Each video-based episode includes an animated overview of a math topic, interactive tools, teacher notes, activity sheets, and assessments. Created for educators in Alberta, MathLive is entirely free (there's no "premium" content or ads encouraging "upgrades). The videos use Flash technology, so this site isn't accessible on iPads, but it is ideal for use with classroom projectors and interactive whiteboards.

Road to Grammar

Road to Grammar Based on an online program originally intended for English Language Learners, Road to Grammar Junior provides an interactive tool for teaching and reinforcing understanding of English grammar for students ages 7 to 13, and of course, for ELL students. There are 350 quizzes on all parts of speech, although elementary students may find some a bit advanced. Click "Show only easy quizzes" to reduce the list to a more appropriate level. There is also a selection of fun games that reinforce grammar fluency. Road to Grammar is free, and includes only a minimum of advertising.

Thinglink Interactive Images

Thinglink is a very cool application for creating interactive images. Simply upload any photo or image to Thinglink, and add tags to label and embed hyperlinks. The educational possibilities are limitless. Teachers can upload and tag historical images for a social studies lesson, tag famous paintings for an art lesson, or tag a map or images related to a school (or virtual)field trip. In my example, I uploaded a photo I took of the Massachusetts State House, and added a few tags that lead to more information about the building, the architect, and the state flag. I also embedded the image below, so that you can see who easily you can view and interact with images embedded in a blog or classroom webpage. Teachers can also allow students to edit and add links to images for a more collaborative style of learning. For example, students could be asked to add tags identifying elements of a map or historic landmark. Thinglink images can be shared on blogs, wikis, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and via email. A free subscription to Thinglink allows a maximum of 50 image uploads; educators can upgrade to a discounted monthly fee-based subscription for expanded features.