Study Skills

Quizlet could be useful at the early elementary level for teachers making flashcards for letters, vocabulary terms and math facts. In middle and high school teachers could create a virtual study guide for quizzes and tests. Students could also create their own study guides. I would have used this tool in my high school and college years.

https://quizlet.com/130415326/first-grade-math-flash-cards/

Augmented Learning App

I investigated both the Flashcard app and the Colar Mix app. Both have the potential to spark student interest in learning. I liked the Flashcard app in particular and have shared and recommended it to the Kindergarten teaches in my building. It could help to enhance learning when it comes to becoming efficient in recognizing letters and sounds. There are other paid apps with Flashcard that would also be helpful in memorizing simple addition facts. One thing that I found to be a glitch with the Flashcard app is that periodically it will not read the camera. When this happens I have to restart my Ipad to get it to work again. I don't know if the glitch is with the app or with my Ipad. One thing I had thought about trying was uninstalling the app and reinstalling it.

QR Codes

In the modern classroom students access apps and different websites for learning purposes. As teachers it is our job to guide them to specific websites that can enhance student learning. One way to access these websites is by directly typing in the url address. This could be cumbersome. Websites and apps can also be bookmarked or placed on the desktops of devices. These desktops and bookmarks become cumbersome as well as they begin to fill up. QR codes can provide a more efficient way to access apps and web sights. QR codes can be printed out for students to use at schools. They can be shared with parents for them as well as their child to access different sites at home through paper print outs or through sharing the QR code electronically. It could also be beneficial for students themselves to create their own QR codes.

Lego Motion Movie

Using The Lego app requires a bit of patience and precision to create a movie with smooth transitions between each slide. Thus could provide a great tool for some students to think outside of the box and create a project to convey a similar message that they might convey through the writing process. https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3iJ2tekZ90-OXZBREJ3WnZoSDA

Imovie project

The Imovie app would be more beneficial for high school students but I could see elementary aged students using it to create videos with pictures and music to introduce a history or social studies project or report. Teachers could use it as well to create a video to enhance or introduce a lesson in a variety of subjects. It would be a great way for students to interact with technology to perhaps create a video to go along with a unit of study. I know a teacher who would take his students on a field trip to Makinaw Island each year and gather pictures and make a music slide show of the whole field trip experience. I have created several vidoes from Imovie to highlight seasons for track and cross country teams that I have coached. Here is a link to one of these projects that I uploaded to Itunes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSXUilpJpbc

Garage Band Post

I used the Garage Band App to introduce vowels. Garage Band can provide a medium to reach the interests of particular students who might normally be tough to reach. More importantly I could see it being used by students to allow them to become invested in their own learning through the creation of specific projects aligned to specific parts of the curriculum. It would be a great tool for those students who are creative in the area of music. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B3iJ2tekZ90-ZjZrekh3UGJtVGs

Talking Face Object

I used YakIt kids for this activity. This was a simple user friendly tool that I could see students using with some support initially and after some practice on their own. I created a short video with a question and a fact about Leap Year. Students could easily use it in this way to present short clips about any topic related to the curriculum adding faces to animate or inanimate photos to present information about the topic at hand. Students could also use it for longer assignments such as research papers, creating several slides to go with their final product. It could also be a great way for students to present arguments to go along with a persuasive paper. https://drive.google.com/a/apps.harpercreek.net/file/d/0B3iJ2tekZ90-VmpSbE9vZE83Zms/view?usp=sharing

Gami

This tool is still similar to some of the stor making apps that I used earlier in the course in the way that it could be used with to support my teaching. It could easily be used as a different mode to teach or reinforce specific lessons. This could also be a great tool for students to use in creating and sharing their own writing. It could also support a readers theatre approach giving students a chance to read published text. The paid version would need to be purchased to allow more time for each project. https://tellagami.com/gami/3DHEKG/

Finding Apps

I used the website TCEA to find apps that might be of use for my students. Most of the apps that I use are free. For the most part even apps that are not free are inexpensive, but even for a $1 it is difficult to justify its purchase without knowing much about it. This is where evaluation tools can be helpful to sift through apps and decide if they are worth paying for. Some apps have free versions and paid for versions and it is also helpful to test the free versions first before purchasing to paid for versions. Many of the apps are half price of they are purchased in volume of 20 or more. This in combination of evaluation tools and rubrics can save schools money as they choose particular apps to purchase for multiple devices.

Evaluating Apps

Teachers could evaluate apps individually for what their needs may be in the classroom, but a team approach would work well also with grade level teachers in buildings working as a team to look at apps that would enhance specific areas of the curriculum.

GoSoapBox

All of these apps seem to be similar in the way that communication between teachers and students is immediate. All can allow teachers to set up quizzes with students giving responses. Socrative seemed a little more accessible as far as creating multiple choice, true/false and short answer questions. I really wanted to try Infuselearning because of the access to download pictures on the web and the ability for teachers and students to draw directly onto these images but it seemed that the infuselearning website is down. It seems that of the three, Socrative is the only one that can be accessed through an app. I couldn't find an app for the other two so I went directly to the web site. The feature that shows what students and how many students are getting the lesson or not is a nice feature of GoSoapBox. I actually created a lesson from Soapbox and had a group of my students interact with it in the classroom. One thing that I found was when they went to answer the question they were not allowed to finish the process. A message kept coming up saying that the response was too short. I couldn't figure out how to get around the question and really did not want to take too much time investigating this during instructional time. The other unanticipated matter with using Soapbox in the classroom was that the wifi system in our district blocks some content. We found out that Soapbox was one of these. We can get around this but I had to log on as teacher for each computer each time a student wanted to access it. This obviously took away from instructional time. If I were to choose one to use it would probably be infuse but their website was not available and there was a message that said that they were closing down in April. I apologize for multiple copies of screenshots but our computer updated Microsoft today and the process of saving pictures from google drive to my computer was a little different. Before I figured this out I had already downloaded multiple copies but it is hard to determine if they are they same until they are opened in my blogger.

Socrative Report

Using this app as a teacher and a student was really quicker and easier than I thought. This would be a great tool to check for understanding of math skills, for answering questions for books read in reading groups and for taking spelling tests. One of the biggest perks is having electronic access to what skills students have mastered for documenting and sharing with parents. The one thing I had difficulty with was getting a report. I was given three options for saving the reports for my quiz. Email, download and google drive but the only option that I was allowed to click on was email. When I clicked on it a message came up saying that a report would be sent and it could take up to 5 minutes. After 10 minutes I had the report sent again and still no luck. I will check my email later today to see if it has been sent.

Guided Access

Guided access can be used to keep students away from specific features of an app when they may utilize them intentionally. As a teacher what I see more often is students finding themselves where they are not supposed to be while touching a button or section of the screen unintentionally. When this happens they will usually require my assistance getting back to where they are supposed to be because they are unable to do it themselves. It could also be used for teachers to disable features of an app that they don't want students using or they haven't taught them to use yet. One downside to all of this might be blocking off a specific feature of an app as a teacher and forgetting to enable it immediately when finished. This could lead to some confusion later on when trying to access this particular feature on the app.

Text to Speech

I was somewhat familiar with text to speech options for different book websites such as Razkids. While working with LD students who struggle with reading it has been nice to utilize some of these websites. I had never experimented with the text to speech app on my Ipad previously and I was pleasantly surprised to see what I can access for my students simply with this option on my Ipad.

Dictation to text

Here is a link to my dictation to text slide show created on Educreations. I thought that I used this app to post a slide show for another post to my Google Drive but I wasn't able to figure out how to do it for this slide show. I hope that you are able to open it through the link below.

Other Teacher Tools

Teacher's Assistant Lite is another tool to monitor student behavior, positive and negative. A nice feature of this tool is that is quick and easy communication can be made with parents through their Ipad or Smart phone via email or dropbox. Teacher Kit is another tool which offers many features. Teachers can create seating charts, record attendance, log behaviors and track grades with this app.

Dojo

Currently as a Resource Room teacher the only behavior tracking system I use is through Behavior Plans for specific students. Tools such s Dojo would tie in well with a classroom teacher's behavior management system.

Remind Post

Tools such as remind is another avenue to communicate with parents. Of course communication such as this has been available for years with email and creating email groups. I suppose an advantage of an app such as Remind is that the message goes directly to a cell phone so the message for most would be more immediate with most individuals having their phone by their side 24/7. One thing that I notice in the activity directions was I was asked to describe the class and create a class code. This option did not come up. I found an instructional video which showed this option to come up as I created the class but it would not come up with mine. I'm wondering if this is an updated version of Remind. The person I invited to join my class responded and was added. I'm wondering if a code was automatically created and sent with the shared request. I decided to set my class up not in my classroom setting but in my setting as a track coach as a way of communicating with my athletes. When practice starts I will share the class with them when I get their email addresses. I have uploaded several screen shots for this activity. I was unable to find one screen on Remind with everything that was asked for in the activity so with all the screen shots I have taken 1 class, 1 sent message and I subscriber should be visible. Also for this project I tried uploading my screen shots to google drive and then downloading them to my computer. For some reason the download to my computer would not read the file. I tried taking a screen shot from the files from google drive on my computer, cropping them on Paint and pasting and copying them to a word document but blogger would not allow me to attach a word document. I am not sure what else to do so I will email you the attachment of the document. I hope that this is ok but spending 90 minutes trying to get my screen shot onto blogger has left me frazzled.

Schoology Post

Currently I do not use LMS in the classroom. Both Edmodo and Schoology have the potential to enhance student experience for my students outside of the classroom with parent support. Some of the features for Emodo seemed a little more user friendly for me. For example I was able to update current posts in Edmodo but could not figure out how to do this with Schoology. I have attached photos of the document I attached for my created assignment (a reading log) in Schoolology as well as the video that I created. https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3iJ2tekZ90-dVFuRTNmOEVISEk