What is Storybird and Why Use It

I made this short voice-over recording using the ShowMe app on the iPad, and used the app as an opportunity to tell you something about the Storybird website that students in previous courses have used with students.




While I was also playing around with the ShowMe app, I also made another quick video to tell you about a free professional development opportunity coming up the first Saturday October 5. So here it goes.

How Can Blogging Help Reluctant Readers

Thinking about why you should integrate blogging into your classroom. I am cross-posting a blog post from Edudemic, and including a link to the very source by inserting the link in the post's title.

Let me know what you think after you read through the post. Do you agree? Are you motivated to start blogging in your classroom?

How Blogging Can Help Reluctant Writers

By Dr. Patricia Fioriello on August 25, 2013

Via jeffzelaya.com

Blogging is an excellent way of motivating students to develop a lifelong love of learning. Writing is a process, and when they learn this they will be able to apply the skills to other aspects of their schooling. It also teaches children critical thinking skills which will help them as they progress through school. Along with the development of critical thinking skills, students will learn how to conduct research. This is particularly important both in school and in the workplace they will one day take part in.

Blogging Helps Students Connect Different Subjects

This is particularly important when it comes to reluctant learners. Some children shy away from certain subjects, and it can be difficult to get them involved. Blogging for kids will make it easier for them to make connections between what might at first seem to be dissimilar subjects.

Blogging Encourages Students To Sort Out Their Feelings

In fact, writing is so important in this regard that it is considered a form of creative therapy. Children who blog regularly can reduce anxiety and increase self-esteem. With blogging, there isn’t the same pressure that some children feel with social media. Instead of it being a popularity content, blogging becomes a personal and positive way to express individuality.

Blogging Improves Writing Skills

With constructive feedback, it increases grammar skills and helps children with the development of sentence structure. Learning these skills in an interactive way tends to be more effective than sitting through dry lesson plans. Increased grammar and writing skills will also help improve a student’s reading level. This increased comprehension will make reading more exciting and is likely to create a lifelong love of the written word.

Blogging Helps Students Find Their Own Voice

Most teachers can attest to the fact that students who only complete writing assignments as homework tend to turn in assignments that all sound the same. Blogging on a regular basis teaches children the value and importance of their own creativity.

Blogging will excite students about writing, and exciting them about this valuable skill will help encourage them to participate in it on a regular basis. They will learn that polished expression does not just magically appear, but instead is a step by step process that gets easier the more they practice.

What Can Teachers Do?

One of the most important steps is to share your own enjoyment of writing and blogging. Kids love to emulate. If they see your enjoyment, even the most reluctant writers are more apt to make an honest attempt. Seeing you write and knowing it’s something important to you will have a greater impact than if you simply talk about it with them.

Providing feedback is another crucial step you can take to make blogging both fun and inspirational. Remember that feedback needs to be genuine, because most children will be able to spot it if it’s not.

The best way to provide genuine feedback is to make it specific. Telling a student that you like his or her work and that they are a good writer will not be as effective as informing a student that their sentence structure or research skills have improved.

Encouraging your class to write each day is another effective way to motivate a love of writing. Writing on a regular basis will help your students develop ideas and also to understand the evolution of idea development. Do not forget to leave enough time in the classroom to answer any questions that might arise.

Students can find blogging to be exciting, and they will use the valuable skills they learn throughout their lives.

Memorble Quotes to Spark Discussion, Writing, and Other Activites

Quotes often get the juices flowing. These memorable quotes from Oscar-winning filmmaker Hayo Miyazaki might be ones you can use with your students. The graphics alone accompanying the quotes are also worth showing students to stimulate classroom activities.

Although I have embedded the slides here, you can also open the presentation on SlideShare, where I found them, and show them that way, or embed them in your own class blog or website.

Let me know if you would use any or all of these slides with students.

To advance through the slide show, click the arrows, and also feel free to open the show on Slide Show if it's easier for you to view them there.

13 Memorable Quotes from Hayao Miyazaki Films

13 Memorable Quotes from Hayao Miyazaki Films by @charitytemple from Charity Temple

Great Apps for Classroom Use

I found this excellent post at the TUAW website and had to share it verbatim. Full credit goes to the site as indicated by this direct link there.  If you click on the image below, you will go directly to the source. Of the Apps noted in this review, some of my favorites are Explain Everything, Weebly, the Camera (so obvious but not used enough and will have a separate blog post about it coming up shortly), iMovie, Dropbox (though am using Google Drive often for cloud storage as well), Puppet Pals (especially for younger students, but fun for all), and Popplet (a graphic organizer, web generating tool). These apps are ordinarily used on iPads, but some are available for any device or other devices (such as iMovie on a Mac) and Dropbox for any device. Weebly is a web-based tool that can be used on any device. It is an excellent tool for easily creating a website. Let us know which of the teacher recommended apps interest you or you use.

Apps teachers use to tame the classroom and teach their students

by Kelly HodgkinsSep 6th 2013 at 4:00PM

It's the start of a new school year, which means you've probably got a stack of new books on your desk, a drawer full of new pencils and an iPad that desperately needs some new apps. TUAW is here to help you build a new app list, and we did so with the help of some friends.

We consulted with students, teachers and some of the top tech and educational bloggers to generate this list. In this article, we highlight the teachers who lead the classroom. Here are the apps that they use:

Kelly Tenkely of Anastasis Academy in Centennial, CO.

What makes Anastasis unique is our approach to learning. We are an inquiry based school that believes students must be involved in their own learning. We have a 1:1 iPad program that is a BYOD (bring your own device), and the iPad is the only supply on our supply list.

I chose the iPad as our common learning device because it is so incredibly intuitive. Preschool through ninth grade can pick it up and immediately put it to use for a wide variety of learning activities without being taught how to use it first. We are paperless in that all student work gets digitized. Even building projects get captured digitally. We purchase the educational apps that the students need as a school. Below is a list of our favorite titles.

Meraki This is Cisco's free device management platform. We use it to manage devices (including restrictions) while students are on campus. Meraki lets us purchase apps through the Volume Purchase Program and push them to student devices as needed. There is also a virtual backpack that lets us share files and documents with teachers and students. Fantastic tool and free cannot be beat!

Evernote We use Evernote as a complete ePortfolio solution. All student work is documented in Evernote. Evernote is a great ePortfolio because parents can access it easily, it is easily searched, and students can record learning that is both natively digital as well as not. If students create a physical model or project in our prototype lab, they can easily take a picture directly in Evernote. We also love the sheer number of apps that integrate seamlessly in Evernote. If students complete a project in iMovie, Keynote, Pages, etc. that does not seamlessly integrate, students create a note with the title of the project and list where the project can be found on their device. This makes it easy to keep track of all learning. Teachers and students have shared notebooks to share work.

Camera This is an obvious app but one not to be overlooked! This is probably our most used app. Students are constantly documenting their learning with the camera. Whether it is field work on a field trip, a project that they are documenting steps of, or a presentation they are giving, our students have a HUGE collection of evidence collected with the camera.

iMotion HD This has become one of our students absolute FAVORITE ways to document learning or progress. Students use iMotion HD to reflect on learning, tell a story, document scientific process, and as a creative outlet. Kids of all ages really love this app! http://ilearntechnology.com/?p=4257

Koostik Because we use the camera so often, our students discovered that they need a way to prop their iPad up for recording. While many cases have this ability built in, they leave a lot to be desired. One of the great field trips we took was to the Koostik headquarters where our students saw how iPad and iPhone sound could be amplified without power. While we were there, our students commented on how cool it would be to have a Koostik that they could use for recording. Koostik created special stands for our students that are perfect for keeping the iPad propped and stable during recording (we used to use stacks of books!) (Technically, this isn't an app, but it's used with an app, so it's cool!)

Voice2Note Lets students turn their Evernote voice notes into text. This is a fantastic app for students who struggle to get their ideas out in writing (often a problem with Dysgraphia). Also wonderful for emerging writers who have a great vocabulary but struggle with spelling and limit their writing as a result.

Postach.io This is an app that works with Evernote to turn notes into blog posts. This is the way that students "publish" their finished work to share with others publicly. We use the #comments4kids hashtag on Twitter to help our students get feedback from other educators and students. Our kids love getting comments on their hard work from around the world.

Dragon Box This is the most amazing math app I've ever seen. It is the perfect complement to our program because it lets students (as young as 5) play with and discover algebra without knowing that they are actually doing it! It is a little bit of a virtual card game that helps students recognize patterns and rules found in Algebra. Brilliant! Number Pieces- This is another math app that helps students develop a deeper understanding of place value. We love the hands on discover approach that it offers!

SketchNation Lets students create their own app. They can use Sketch Nation to prototype ideas or creatively reflect on learning by creating a game.

Weebly Lets students easily create their own website. Our students created http://LSGWfoundation.weebly.com to raise awareness about social justice issues during one of our inquiry blocks.

Paper A beautiful way to sketch out/share ideas. Students use this app for ideation when they are working on design thinking.

Skitch Skitch is another ideation app we love...integrates seamlessly with Evernote!

Composer Pro students can create their own interactive ebooks without knowing a lot of coding.

Tapose Students can do research and take notes side by side in this app. Very useful for new learning!

FactorSamurai a fun way to practice math facts :)

Explain Everything a recordable whiteboard where students can record their thought process. This helps them break down learning and allows teachers to go back through their thinking one step at a time.

Rover Let's students access flash content from their iPads. We only wish it was a little more reliable!

Other common Apps that we use regularly: Pages, Keynote, iMovie,iBooks, Kindle, MobiCip (filtered web browser), Dropbox.

Glen & Monique Storey, husband and wife teachers from New Zealand

Glen & Monique Storey are teachers in New Zealand. They're lucky enough that each child in their classroom has a MacBook and access to iPads. They're passionate about using apps that engage and motivate learners in the classroom. As developers they bring their experience as teachers and their love of technology to create great apps such as Silent Light and BookBot.

OS X Apps

Skitch (OS X) A free, easy way to annotate and modify pictures, pdfs and websites.

Wunderlist (OS X) A really easy and simple way to be organised. Great design and support.

Mindnode (OS X) A really simple and elegant way to create and manage thinking.

Pixelmator A great way to edit and create more complex pieces of art.

And, of course, the obvious OS X apps that everyone probably knows about: iMovie, iPhoto, GarageBand.

iOS Apps

Explain Everything If I was only allowed to have one app on my classroom iPads, it would be Explain Everything. An absolutely fantastic way to create and share evidence of learning. We use this every day, with every student in our math program and it shows real evidence in developing student learning. (We have examples of kids' work if you need them).

Puppet Pals 2 A really fun and creative way to create narratives or share writing. Kids love Puppet Pals and can quickly and easily create great content.

Silent Light We have a large, open-plan classroom, and Silent Light is one of our essential tools at helping kids manage their own learning and noise level.

100s Board, Rubber Chicken Apps Although a simple app, 100s board is a fantastic tool to use with kids when teaching them about numbers, addition or place value.

Type Drawing A fantastic way to merge writing and art in a creative and unique way. (We have examples of kids' work if you need them).

Poplet The best brainstorming tool that we've ever come across. Simple and adaptable to whatever you might need. Brainstorms can be emailed, saved to camera roll etc.

Math Slide (a series of apps) Great motivational and multiplayer apps to help kids learn their basic facts.

Action Movie Action Movie is great at providing a bit of incentive when writing as a class, especially for boys.

Thank you again to this specific web page for this information which is acknowledged accordingly, and as noted the information has been copied and credited. For those who want the URL as well, here it is, long as it is:
http://www.tuaw.com/2013/09/06/apps-teachers-use-to-tame-the-classrom-and-teach-their-students/

Teacher Motivation and the Start of the School Year

Justin Tarte, Director of Curriculum and Support Services for the St. Louis, MO schools created this slide show presentation and uploaded it as a video to YouTube. He used it for the opening of the school year, and since he posted a link to it on Twitter, others have asked permission to use it. YouTube rights show the video can be shared, so here it is, and let me know what you think. What do you think are effective ways for school administrators to open the school year?

 

On another note, a Texas school district superintendent creates live videos to share with the public and posts them to YouTube. Here is the opening video he used last year, and just wondering what you think of school superintendent's using social media to communicate with the public in this way.

Who Will Be My Hero?

This video was produced by students from Waxahachie Independent School District, TX, and the questions it asks are ones for teachers to consider. Thought I would share it with you for reactions.




The video was released just 4 days ago on YouTube and has had over 4,700 views as of today.

Your Digital Footprint Walks with You

This video, Digital Dossier, has circulated for a while, and I often show it in class, encouraging the teachers in my graduate classes to use it with students, if appropriate, and to consider their own digital footprint.



What's your reaction to the video? Would you share it with students? Does the video make you reconsider what you share online?

The Ten Most Popular Teaching Tools Being Used this Year

Edudemic, a popular media outlet for news about tech in the classroom, just published a post "The 10 Most Popular Teaching Tools Being Used This Year." As you reflect on the year ahead and read the description of each, which do you plan to use and which might you consider? What are your reasons? This post might be worth bookmarking for reference to discuss with other educators as you engage in conversations with them about what tech tools they find the most helpful for their professional work and teaching.

Note the caption under the story's feature picture reminds us of how much the educational professional has changed over time. 

The Art of Storytelling

I just found this great site sponsored by the Delaware Art Museum that connects storytelling with art. There are a variety of ways to use the site, so check it out for yourself and explore around. Tell us what you find that looks of interest. Don't want to spoil it by telling you too much in advance. I have screen captured the page with a link to the site, acknowledging the image source that way. Click on the picture to visit the site.

Watch Your 2-D Drawing Come to Life

This is a fun activity for anyone of any age. Draw a picture using colored pencils, crayons, or any writing tool. Download the colAR app (free from Apple for the iPad). Then open the App on your iPad, and hold the iPad above the drawing as you would when taking a picture. Watch this demo to see how the App makes the picture come to life in 3-D. Can you see how you might use the ColAR app in the classroom to excite students, motivate discussion, andstimulate story telling?



Check this post below to see one way the App was used in a literacy unit of study.

Dot Day Fun! Watch Your Dot Come to Life in Amazing 3D in the colAR App

Been hearing lots of good things from teachers who have tried the App with their students. What are your thoughts about possible uses?

Every Teacher Needs a Sense of Humor

Some years ago, the saying, "Said No Teacher Ever Said," got popularized. Recently, another video using this phrase was made, with lots of irony and satire. I discussed the video (online via Twitter) with another teacher, and we wondered together if it was worth showing to teachers in my class this semester. Well, here it is, and you can decide for yourself. Perhaps you've already seen it. Let me know what you think, and I can send feedback to my colleague who was curious about how teachers in a graduate course would react. There's also the possibility you have already seen it; the video had over 360,000 hits on YouTube as of today, August 27, 2013.

Never Underestimate the Power of Social Media

I was taking a break from my usual fall prep for classes, and shifted over to Facebook. It was when I came across this story which went viral that I decided to take a look. This is one story I will never forget, and the response to it demonstrates once again the power and value of social media to share life stories.

To see the video of "Photo of Wife Carrying Marine Husband--Goes Viral, "click on the image below or the play button in the first embedded video. I have also embedded a version from YouTube in the event that you have trouble accessing the story from the WFSB site.

WFSB 3 Connecticut

If the video does not load for you from WFSB 3, here's an embedded version found on YouTube.


What's your reaction to the video and the voice of social media?