Posted on by under Projects, Reflections

This project was lots of fun to do. I used the iMovie app as well as the camera and photo apps to edit picture a little bit. I enjoyed talking to my grandmother who worked at the sunflower ammunition plant, and having her show me pictures that she took when she worked there. Since most people weren’t allowed to take pictures, I had to find some of the older ones and “pretty ones” online.

The reason I picked the Sunflower Ammunition Plant is because it has a lot of history with me and my family. All of my grandparents worked there and my fathers parents retired from there. It has been a bigpart of my home town and I’m glad I had this opportunity.

Using Apps in the Classroom

Posted on by under App Reviews

The Apps in the Classroom series was created to provide teachers with a few ideas on how to integrate apps into daily classroom instruction. Each guide includes a collection of activities that span age ranges and subjects and can be modified to work in your own learning environment. Inspired by Apple Distinguished Educators, the activities are designed to encourage students to think in new ways and help them take a creative approach to applying and demonstrating learning.

Courses:

There are 18 different courses to choose from in the collection. The three that really drew my attention were:

Photographing History: Archiving with Apps which is all about working on researching topics, and finding the right sources and how to organize them. The course also helps the students bring photos to life with their own imagination. They can use their own ideas to resurrect an old photo into something interesting and new.ow

Hopscotch Lesson Ideas: this talks about different ideas for teachers to use in the classroom. The app Hopscotch offers many different ideas that bring technology and games into every day lessons. It includes math, geography, science, literature, and a foreign language as well.

Scoodle Jam Lesson Ideas: this offers teachers the opportunity to make graphic organizers and customize them to the full extent. This course help teachers use the Scoodle Jam app to its fullest extent and really benefit from it.

How to find it:

Open iTunes U and locate the featured tab at the bottom.

Scroll down to the for educators tab.

Then scroll down until you find the using apps in the classroom tab.

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Stop motion studios  can be used in the classroom for a multitude of ages and a multitude of classes. Any age can make projects with this free app and really benefit greatly from it.

Ages 5-11: these ages can use the app to make videos representing shapes, books, and stories. They can also use it for science projects and to show their processes in a fun and new way. They can and are not limited by some effects of getting older, so they may be able to get extremely creative with their projects.

Ages 11-14: these ages can use the app for literature, math and especially science. This is the part in school when middle school comes around, and the classes become more difficult. Having s method to make projects easy and fun all at the same time. This could benefit them a lot by giving them a new way of doing science projects or making hypothesis.

Ages 14-18: these ages have to make more complex projects and make more of them. This app can be used at any grade level for book reports, science projects again, and mathematical processes.

The app has endless features and for the low cost of nothing, it is hard to pass up for students. I like how you can apply this app to many different ages and grade levels. You can also use it in many different classes for evaluating the students progress. This app has endless possibilities and I hope will be used in my classroom later in life!

Posted on by under App Reviews, Projects

The Water Cycle

 

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I used the app Adobe Slate to create a digital storybook about the water cycle. This app was very easy to use, and after watching a tutorial on YouTube about the ins and outs of Slate, I was quite fond of this app.

The reason I chose this app is simple, the reviews for this app are much better then that other similar apps like Animoto or Storehouse. The app offers many different customizable options for backgrounds and fonts. Slate also offers a very user friendly interface. This is helpful for not so tech savvy people like me.

Price: free!

Pros: very easy to use, it is free, and also has many different options for adding photos, text and links.

Cons: limited on the locations that you can save your project too.

I would recommend this app to anyone that is needing to get away from the old boring ways of PowerPoint, and wants to make the lecture a little more interesting to look at. Very easy and fun app to use!

Interactive Whiteboard Multiples of 9

Posted on by under Uncategorized

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I used the app called ShowMe to make a short interactive whiteboard about how to do multiples of 9 in a different way. ShowMe gave many different options for writing and the buttons and options are very easy to find and use. The app was very very easy to use and was actually kind of fun!

Price: free for download, month is $5.99

Pros: very user friendly. I had no issues trying to figure out what went where and how it worked. Also, you are allowed to use different colors to write with, pause the video, erase all, and even add pictures to the video.

Cons: can’t download without having a month bought, and finding out how to share it takes a little while.

Overall, this app was fantastic. You are able to email the file you create, can edit it before and after you make it, and are given lots of options for what it is you need to do. I really recommend it the anyone that needs or wants to create an interactive whiteboard!

Week 7 blog review: How to add Tech to your Classroom without feeling Overwhelmed

Posted on by under Reflections

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Linda Kardamis has some good ideas about what it means to add technology to the classroom. Some teachers add techno golly because it looks good to the principal and school board when they can say they have used technology in the classroom. However, technology is only good when it helps the students understand what it is you are trying to teach them.

Linda’s blog has a video attached to it, as well as some tips, but the video offers different tools to use for teaching. The video was made by Jennifer Gonzales and is about 10 mintues long. This video gives apps and tools to use as a teacher to help your students in some way. Now these clearly aren’t the only apps that you can use, but it is a good start.

Althought the video wasn’t made by Linda, it is a great source for finding solid apps to use as teachers are stating out. The whole teach for the heart blog site is very well put together and offers lots of suggestions for future and current teachers!

 

One Best Thing iBooks: Mathematics

Posted on by under Projects

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Visaul Mathematics by Julie Garcia is an iBook about a fun way for teaching students graphing. In the iBook, Julie talks about a new fun way she has discovered with her 7th and 8th grade classes. Instead of having the students to worksheet after worksheet on graphing, she has the students do a lab for learning graphing.

This lab is familiar to some as being the Tootsie Pop experiment. In this experiment, the students formulate and conduct procedures to find out how many licks it takes to get to the center of the tootsie pop. They record all their data, and then at the end of everything, are assisted by many different apps that help them graph the data and they can visually see the day at and how it represents their findings. This is a fantastic way for students that struggle with graphing to physically see their progress.

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There are some apps that are used to help the students graph and do the mathematics. There is the camera to take pictures, Numbers that helps students see the statistical data, and ExplainEverything which allows them to draw and talk to explain their findings. These apps help the students explain what they are seeing and finding as they do it with pictures and words.

Overall this project could be very helpful and could really help students that don’t understand graphing the “traditional” ways. Making it easier to understand this topic can help the students later on in mathematics and in science as well. I really enjoyed this iBook and hope you will too!

Week 5 blog review: Tech Edge in the Classroom

Posted on by under App Reviews, Reflections

In the video below, Guy Trainin talks a couple different apps on practicing mathematics.

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The app that I liked was Math Duels. With this app, students can play against each other to practice their math skills and get better at mental math. The app costs $2.99 and offers a multitude of different practice problems. The student can also practice on their own with a timed one player version. Overall, I think it would be a fun for students to use, but the $2.99 may keep students from, being able to use it.

In the next video, Guy Trainin talks about how to write using different apps.

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The app that I found very interesting was called ABC Cursive. This app is very cool because it allows students to trace the letter. This app is free and is readily accessible for students. The app is very easy to use and shows students the correct way to write the letter in cursive and then let’s them trace the letter. The only issue with this is that if the student is using their finger t trace, then they are not getting the muscle memory that writing with a pencil does. Overall thoug, the app can be used very easily in the classroom and could help students that want to learn cursive.

In the final video I watched, Guy shows a couple of apps that help students take notes, and understand their notes better than if they wrote them down.

 

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The app that Guy talks about it called AudioNotes. This app would be great for any age student. This app allows students to voice record their notes and add them to certain parts of their notes. They are also allowed to draw shapes, equations, and anything else that can’t be typed on a keyboard. This app rocks for middle or high school students with helping them learn to take better notes, but it can also help college students take notes faster and more accurately. The downside to this app is it costs $4.99. A little pricey for a note taking app, but if you need help taking better notes, I would suggest it!

Guy Trainin does a very good job of reviewing his apps, and providing comparareble apps all in the same video.

Week 4 blog reflection: iLearn technology

Posted on by under Reflections

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The cite iLearn technology offers many different reviews of apps, and suggestions on ways to use technology in the classroom setting, that are written by differnt teachers, educators, and education enthusiasts. These are all blogs, and there is one that I was drawn too regents I first opened the page.

The blog that I read and and going to review is, Monster Math: Building Menatl Math Skills and Fact Fluency. This blog is more of an app review of the app Monster Math. Since I am a math major, this was a very cool blog.

image Monster Math is an app that helps students gain better understanding of math procedures, and this helps with their mental math process. The app offers many fun games that help the students get a better understanding of their math skills and how to perform the math functions faster.

The blog also offers a couple different ways that the app can be used in the classroom. The blog offers the ideas of using it in 3rd and 4th grades. It helps with subtraction and addition, as well as multiplication and division. It is great for these classes when trying to remember the common mathematic equations using the app like flash cards. This is a fun way to develope a better understanding of the four main areas of math.

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Another way to use the app would be for individual students to use as an individual tracking device. The student can see their progress on their personal technology device and they can see what they need to work on, and what they know pretty well.

This blog offers a very in depth review of the app and is very helpful. The editor of this blog is not given, but whoever wrote it, did a very good job of researching the app. Hopefully I can use the app when I become a teacher!

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