How My School Is Transitioning to Digital Textbooks: Organizing (Step 1 of 5) Overview: The Role of iPads There is no denying iPads are becoming a dynamic tool for education. However, with the integration of new tools into the classroom, there is a learning curve. The evolution of the iPad has created more than just a learning curve, but a cultural shift in the way we access information and connect with the outside world. This fall, Burlington High School will transition to a 1:1 school exclusively with the iPad 2. One of the goals of this initiative is to slowly transition curriculum and textbooks to ePub format. ePub file format allows anyone to create a file that is readable on an iOS device or Kindle like a book. Multi-district Collaborative Event While this transition is exciting and new, there are not many examples out there of the ePub format in use. The organization of the event was lead by three Massachusetts Superintendents: Dr. Event Planning and Organization Once the website was live, we started planning opening keynotes for the first day of the event.
Tech Teacher: iPod, uPod The gizmo phenom also shines in class. Like mushrooms after a spring rain, podcasting is sprouting up everywhere. Chalk it up to the insanely popular Apple iPod, which at last count has sold fourteen kajillion units. Not content to merely listen, iPod devotees now want to jump into the broadcast booth. Anyone with a microphone and an Internet connection suddenly seems to have a podcast, and for good reason: It's very easy to produce and upload audio clips. The tools are cheap, the files are easy to share, and just about anyone can do it. For years, savvy teachers have used various media to help their students connect to the world. The cool thing about podcasting is that you really don't need much equipment -- essentially, a computer with a microphone jack, and a microphone. The final stage is to get that podcast onto the Internet so the world can absorb your students' auditory insights. Think of this feed as your own personal radio channel.
Gamify Your Class with VoiceThread Mobile The following is a post by Michelle Pacansky-Brock and originally appeared at Gamification involves integrating game mechanics and design techniques into your class to boost learner engagement and provide problem-solving opportunities. How you gamify your class is a creative process, but one key method that opens new dimensions of brainstorming is locating a tool with unique characteristics, like VoiceThread Mobile. What is VoiceThread Mobile? VoiceThread Mobile is the app version of the original, web-based VoiceThread. VoiceThread Mobile is powerful because it frees learners from the boundaries of classrooms, homes, and offices. Note: VoiceThread Mobile is available for iOS devices only; Android version is in development. How do I use VoiceThread Mobile to gamify learning? To see how other instructors are using VoiceThread Mobile, watch the VoiceThread below by clicking the play button. Additional Tips for Success
10 tips to encourage quality student filmmaking in the classroom Reposted from: Did you know that filmmaking helps to develop higher order thinking skills? Check out Niko Theodosakis’s The Director in the Classroom: How Filmmaking In..., and explore how making movies fosters important skills like visioning, research, problem solving, logic, planning and analyzing. With apps like iMovie, making quality films in the classroom is easier than ever. Check out these 10 tips below to really support quality filmmaking in your classroom: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
7 Tips for Effectively Managing Your iPad Classroom **** Interview from THE Journal... The full article is at iPads are a great tool to encourage continual sharing and collaboration in the classroom, says education technology consultant Sam Gliksman. Gliksman runs iPads for Education, a Ning network that has drawn several thousand educators and other people interested in exploring the use of iPads in schools. He has captured much of what he's gleaned from working with schools and teachers on their iPad programs in a new book, iPad in Education for Dummies. 1. iPads Aren't Meant to be Shared From its earliest days, the iPad was designed for personal--not "institutional"--use, Gliksman said. "In grades one, two, and three, you're probably fine with that. 2. According to Gliksman, what catches most schools up is that they buy iPads "and just assume that it's a different form of computer and they can handle them the same way--and they simply can't." 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Create an All-iPad Class Radio Show with AudioBoo, Bossjock, GoodReader, & SoundCloud <div class="greet_block wpgb_cornered"><div class="greet_text"><div class="greet_image"><a href=" rel="nofollow"><img src=" alt="WP Greet Box icon"/></a></div>Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to <a href=" rel="nofollow"><strong>subscribe to the RSS feed</strong></a> for updates on this topic.<div style="clear:both"></div></div></div> Do students in your classroom regularly create online “radio shows” to share information with parents and others? With more people than ever (over half of U.S. adults) owning smartphones capable of accessing Internet websites and playing digital audio files, classroom radio shows can potentially reach a larger percentage of your parents than ever. You may have noticed I’ve used the phrase “classroom radio show” instead of podcast in this post. On this day..
A Digitized School Needs a Digitized School Paper I asked senior Newsprint editor, Catherine Denton to guest post about how technology permeates our award winning publication. Like all things Mercy, the school newspaper, Newsprint, has been following a “digitized” path for years. The monthly print version of the paper is designed via Adobe. Newsprint came to a technological “full-circle” with the advent of their website in 2010. Since then, Newsprintnow has strived to adapt to Mercy’s changing technological conditions. In an effort to better cover the entire school community, the editors decided to create Newsprintnow “beats” for staff members to cover. Alternate story forms, or stories not written in the traditional paragraph format, have been a staff-wide focus on Newsprintnow, as well. Speaking of tweeting, the @mercynewsprint Twitter has over 100 followers. Paralleling the school’s continuous technological growth and maturity, the computer lab is also being redesigned next year.
eBook Publishing – Software | UD iBooks Authors The Software Because e-pubs are really HTML 5 files, an adventurous person could code a whole book by hand. Luckily there are some editing tools that can help non-scripters with formatting. Text Editors with e-Pub Formatting BlueGriffon EPUB Edition 1.6.1: The BlueGriffon EPUB Edition Editor is a full featured, cross platform, WYSIWYG editor based on the BlueGriffon Editor. iBooks Author: iBooks Author (IBA) is Apple’s iBook editor. IBA also features the ability to do fixed, multi-column layouts with text wrapping images. Jutoh: With the Jutoh editor, you can create a book from scratch or import an existing book. It is not a full fledged page layout program with columns and text boxes or absolute positing of content. You can not edit the HTML in the basic Jutoh editor. Jutoh is cross platform, and works on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Pages: Pages is Apple’s text editor. Pages is part of the iWork suite of software. Sigil: Sigil is a free cross platform editor that some people really like.
The value of knowing instead of Googling Googling is fast and efficient. But some things shouldn’t be left to Internet searches. “Your curriculum shouldn’t be Google-able.” I’ve heard different versions of this at conferences, on blogs and in Twitter posts during the last year. Teachers shouldn’t focus on simple information learning anymore, many of them contend. I agree. But I only agree to a certain point. Knowing information and being able to recall it is not going out of style anytime soon. Here’s an example from my area of instruction: Spanish. Let’s imagine — in my own fantasy dream world — that many of my students will daily live in worlds where they’ll have to rely on their language skills. They’re in Argentina on business and must answer questions about the product they’re selling. Who has the best chance of wooing clients and earning their respect — someone who improvises in the clients’ native language on the fly or who has to talk through his iPhone? There’s something to recalling information from memory.
6 Great Apps to Turn your iPad into Collaborative Whiteboard So you want to use your iPad as a digital whiteboard, well there are apps for it. It is really pretty amazing the things we can now do with iPad. From teaching basic Math conceptions to young learners to cultivating higher order critical thinking skills, you name it and there is an app for it. 1- Educreations Interactive White Board Educreations turns your iPad into a recordable whiteboard. 2- Show Me Interactive Whiteboard ShowMe allows you to record voice-over whiteboard tutorials and share them online. 3- Doceri Combining screencasting, desktop control, and an interactive whiteboard in one app, you’ll never have to turn your back to the class or audience again. 4- Groupboard Collaborative Whiteboard Groupboard turns your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad into a collaborative whiteboard, allowing you to draw and chat in real time with other people anywhere on the internet, even with users using a web browser. 5- Whiteboard HD 6- Splashtop Whiteboard Courtesy of Edudemic
15 iPad Skills Every Teacher and Student should Have Check the learning goals below and share with us your feedback. Enjoy 1- My students should be able to create presentations . Here are the apps to help you achieve this goal : Sliderocket Idea Flight3- Slideshark5- SlideGrabber6- Prezi Viewer4- Xavier Presentation 2- My students should be able to create digital stories. 1-StoryKit2- Talking Tom & Ben News3- I Tell a Story4- Scholastic Storia5- Talking Tom Cat6- Toontastic7- Our Story8- Bunsella Bedtimes Story 3- My students should be able to create eBooks . 1- Book Creator for iPad2- eBook Magic3- Demibooks Composer4- Story Patch5- Creative Book Builder 4- My students should be able to print their docs right from their iPad. 1- Epson iPrint2- Print Magic3- ACT Printer4- Doc Printer5- Air Sharing 5- My students should be able to create videos . 1- Animoto Video2- Videolicious3- Vidify app4- ReelDirector5- Magisto6- Super 87- Vintagio8- iMovie 6- I want to Improve my students reading skills. 11- My students should be able to screen share .
11 Tips to Keep iOS 7 From Destroying Your Battery Life Exploring Failure - Getting Large Videos Off Your #iPad Wondering how to get all that student work or long videos (30+ minutes) off your 16gig iPad? That's a question I spent 3 hours on yesterday, and fellow teammate Mary Ray also spent her share of time. Believe it or not, about 9gigs of video content on a 16gig iPad doesn't leave much space...we could only load one app at a time in addition to the stock Apple apps. However, the one tip Mary didn't share was the one that actually worked--Using BitTorrent Sync ("btsync" for short) to make a backup of all images/videos in the Camera Roll on your iPad to your computer (the option also exists to send files to another device running BTSync). Here's what Mary shared, all of which are great options that didn't work because we were using a supervised iPad (e.g. mobile device management system is Casper) that had not been upgraded to iOS 7, while the Mac that had "made it" had also been upgraded. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. If you haven't exploredBTSync (free, no cost), then you'll definitely want to!
HippoCampus - Free Videos and Primary Source Documents I came across this great website while combing through the internet. HippoCampus is essentially a huge repository for educational videos that are grouped into a series of videos that comprise ‘courses’. HippoCampus features videos in content areas such as Math, Natural Science, Social Sciences, and Humanities. The nice thing about HippoCampus is that it vets all the videos it syndicates from its sources, meaning that random YouTube videos are not included, but great videos from Khan Academy are. It also lists a ton of resources for further learning via links underneath the streaming video. HippoCampus is a project of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE). I think that many students will find great value in this site as students tend to have lots of questions about math once they get home and don’t always have the resources to find help. Check out HippoCampus and make sure to share with your students! Tags: HippoCampus, videos About the Author