Suzanne's Ed Tech Reflections

Toontastic is a storytelling app for creating your own cartoon stories. Design your set, create characters, act out the learning. Students can draw, animate, narrate, and record their Launchpad Toys, the creators of Toontastic, was recently acquired by Google and the full version of the app is now free! There are hundreds of characters and backgrounds to choose from and videos can be exported to the Photos app, posted online, or edited in iMovie. Download the pdf Learn more on their website: http://www.launchpadtoys.com/ Download the app:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/toontastic/id404693282?mt=8

The use of manipulatives and models for math aid students in learning math conceptually. While physical manipulatives are great there are also a lot of math manipulative apps available.These math manipulative apps align well with the common core math standards and allow students to develop conceptual understanding of many math concepts. Here are a few teachers and students have been using: Virtual Manipulatives is a app from ABCya.com and provides both fraction bars and fraction circles. In addition to fractions, there are models for decimals and percents. The app includes an pen tool for annotating on the screen. In this lesson, the teacher and students were using the app to decompose both simple fractions and mixed numbers. Virtual Manipulatives: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/virtual-manipulatives!/id471341079?mt=8 Number Pieces is from The Math Learning Center. There are two apps in this series: Number Pieces and Number Pieces Basic. The apps both contain sets...

One of the 1:1 iPad teachers created a nice flip learning lesson on similes. She created her flip learning video using Explain Everything, which her students watched at home. In class the next day, they reviewed the concept and the teacher modeled creating a smilie using the Shadow Puppet Edu app. The students first had to create their comparison and get approval from the teacher; then they created their own Shadow Puppet Edu video simile. While observing, I created one too! Download the Free ShadowPuppet Edu app:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/shadow-puppet-edu/id888504640?mt=8 Learn More:  http://get-puppet.co/education/

Post-it® Notes are really popular both for teachers and students. But what do you do with a all of those little squares at the end of a brainstorming session or project? You digitize them of course using the Post-It Plus app. Download the pdf Free in the App Store:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/post-it-plus/id920127738?mt=8

In Arizona, students learning English as a Second Language are required to take a state assessment called AZELLA to check their progress in learning english. Prior to taking the test, teachers often have students practice some of the types of skills and activities they will see on the test. They are provided some resources for this but one teacher decided she needed more and wanted them to be more engaging for the students. She used the Pic Collage app to create these practice activities for writing. Much better than black and white practice prompts!

I have posted before that Explain Everything is one of our favorite apps. It is just so versatile and creative. Students and teachers are using it a lot to explain concepts, create flip learning video lessons, take notes, and so much more. But sometimes we just need to come across a couple of new and refreshing ideas for using an app! So here are a couple of nice blogs posts with ideas. iPaddiction posted about a teacher that created her own audio recordings of To Kill a Mockingbird.  She recorded the book by chapter so that her students would all be able to access the text. So she found the book in pdf format and imported the document into EE and then recorded herself reading with proper pacing and expression. http://ipaddiction.blogspot.com/2015/01/explain-everything-for-read-aloud-book.html Think back to those VH-1 Pop-Up videos from the 1990's. Greg Kulowiec posted about using EE to create similar pop-up videos. His post outlines the process but he also has a great vi...