As a teacher, I am often asked by parents and by other teachers about apps to use with their children. I always recommend ones that encourage children to be creative and allow them to express themselves in a positive way. These are several of my favorite Android apps for Preschool - adult. I have included a variety of types. I also like these because the product can be saved to... More →
If your situation is similar to many I have encountered in multiple school districts around the country, BIP tracking looks different in each school you visit, heck sometimes in every classroom you visit. There are charts, tally sheets, narratives, and every type of tracking mechanism under the sun, but if not every teacher is using the same method it is very hard to turn any of the data that... More →
X Construction is a really fun, but challenging bridge-building simulation game/app. Students construct different length bridges in different settings, but always to allow a train of passengers to cross safely. Scores are based on the amount of building materials remaining unused, the length of time spent building the bridge, and the amount of stress the bridge withstands. If the structure... More →
While Dragon Dication by Nuance is not the only dictation application on the market, in this educators opinion, it is the most polished and one of the most widely used. If you are not familiar with this type of program it is simple to explain: you say it and the program types it. For fellow special educators and general education teachers alike, this probably elicits a Scooby Doo-like... More →
One of the best things about the Xperia tablet is it’s versatility. Not only do you have a content consumption device with apps to interact with, digital reader functionality, and Internet accessibility, you also have a content creation device that can act as a still camera, a video camera, a sound recorder, and a productivity suite. The challenge in a one tablet classroom is finding ways in which... More →
I live in Minnesota where the weather can be extreme. Thank goodness there are weather apps so that I can stay inside. If I were planning a unit on weather in my classroom, the first thing I would do is round up resources that I have available, the resources online and the apps on my Sony Xperia Tablet. In my classroom I would have thermometers, a barometer and books. Then... More →
http://Mathsframe.co.uk This British website is the home to many interactive math tools and resources which run perfectly on my Sony Xperia tablet. Many of these are available free, while an even greater selection is available by subscribing for about $15 per year. While these are described as being “Interactive Whiteboard Resources” they can certainly be used with a tablet with or without a projector. Think about... More →
This post is the first in a monthly series of posts about Google Apps for Education and how it can make an Administrator’s life more efficient, so you spend less time with paperwork and more time in classes, at school activities, and with parents, students and teachers. If you’re not familiar with the power of Google Apps for Education, welcome! Here’s a quick overview: ... More →
So you have one tablet, does it have any use in a busy classroom of learners with an already busy teacher? YES! Having a limited supply of any tool or resource means we need to be even more thoughtful and intentional about how we use that tool. Here are a few ideas for integrating your tablet into the teaching and learning in your classroom, even if you only have one... More →
Using a tablet in physical education or science as a measurement tool for measuring and recording heart rate is easy with Cardiograph by Micropinch, a free Android app. Cardiograph records your heart rate and keeps the data so you can see the rate on various and times. Each data set is automatically time and date stamped and saved into a profile. You can have multiple profiles. How it works You... More →
Throughout the majority of most educators careers augmentative alternative communication devices (AAC’s) have been both limited in number and rather hefty in price. Rigid solutions such as Go Talks could range up to $300 and were toy-ish in appearance without the ability to customize very much at all. More Robust options could literally be thousands of dollars, and while well made, stood out as different from technology... More →
I love to read. Don’t you? I love books, magazines, manuals, blogs, and more. One of the challenges teachers face is how to instill that love of reading in their students. Thinking about the digital students we have today, I thought about what we can do to instill that love of reading with technology. Here are some suggestions. Connect with other readers online. Scholastic has a community for... More →
I’ve always felt that one of the goals of a teacher is to help each student feel like a rock star. Thanks to an observant colleague who saw a couple of kids playing with Songify, I think I have the next tool to help realize that goal. What Is It? Songify is a simple and free app that you can use on your Xperia tablet to record students... More →
When rolling out the Google Apps for Education Suite to educators, Google Drive is easily in the first three application shared. And why not? It’s different yet familiar, it’s collaborative and you can do some neat tricks with it. Like a puppy. But with less mess. Google Drive is great to show teachers and they will come up with some great plans to use with their... More →
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Ask a 6th grader how many different jobs there are, and you might get, "Well there's (what my mom does), (what my dad does), teacher, police officer, football player, movie star, and the president of the United States. Did I get them all?" Hopefully not, but more to the point, there are remarkably few opportunities in most curricula to explore lots of different careers in any kind of efficient... More →
Having a tablet or other mobile device that may well be handed among several students as part of an activity can cause problems if the students have multiple accounts they need to access. Imagine, for example, that three students in a group will use one device, and each has a GAFE (Google Apps for Education) account. How do they access their accounts without stepping into each others' mail, files, etc.? ... More →
What Is It? Class Dojo is a robust behavior tracking and management application designed for teachers and parents which allows a teacher to create a customized icon for each student. These icons can then be used to attribute either positive or negative behavior marks towards individual students or even the entire class. As a I stated previously, this app can be highly individualized, but let’s... More →
One of my favorite ways to curate the web is via Symbaloo, a web 2.0 tool that allows the user to create webmixes of their favorite sites. The tool is easy to learn, and it’s free. There are all kinds of reasons to like Symbaloo webmixes. First, they are very customizable. You can create custom buttons to represent each URL you would like to add. Also, you can have... More →
Every educator has too many tasks, not enough time and is pulled in a million directions. Here is a quick run-down of my favorite apps to use with my Sony Xperia tablet (or other Android-enabled device) to streamline life, while still staying effective. Evernote - Take notes on your tablet, add pictures, audio recordings or attachments quickly to your notes, along with sharing “notebooks” to collaboratively edit;... More →
Newton’s laws of motion help us understand how objects in the world move around us. Through these apps students of all ages can understand the basics of physics and the comprehension skill of cause and effect. First I would allow students to time to explore and play with the apps. Several are listed below. Then I would introduce Sir Isaac Newton and his laws of motion. I... More →
By no stretch of the imagination, am I a professional photographer. I like taking pictures of my work with schools, teachers and students and I love taking pictures of school signs. I also believe in the need to document, in pictures, the fantastic things that are happening in our schools every day. Photos capture moments that will never, ever happen again. So in working with my Sony Xperia tablet,... More →
Being data-informed as a teacher is critical, especially in the Information Age. The more information we have about our learners, the more capable we are of designing lessons that enhance student learning. Finding ways to collect student feedback quickly and with the user-experience in mind is becoming more and more easy. Thanks to web 2.0 and the app culture, we now have the means to take the pulse of any group,... More →
One of the things that I love about tablet devices like the Xperia is that they are playgrounds for self-motivated, exploratory learning. An Internet-connected tablet offers unlimited possibilities for discovering new, wonder-inducing things to know. That said, with all of the world at your fingertips, it is hard to know where to begin. As a service to my fellow explorers, I have provided 10 of my favorite places to learn, explore... More →
So it’s day one of a new unit on punctuation and grammatical usage. You have twenty students that you expect to have a working command of commas, periods, quotation marks, and everything in between by the end of the next grading period. Where do you start? What do these kids already know, and what are they totally unaware of? You can craft a pre-test... More →
I love art. I love drawing, painting, and creating art of all kinds. My students usually cheered when I got out the art supplies. Students love art too. One of the wonderful features of the Sony Xperia Tablet is that it allows students to be artistically creative and to share their work. Illustration apps allow students to express themselves through drawing, to illustrate their stories, and to communicate. Their illustrations... More →
I should start by making it clear I know Karen and Gene, the two gifted educators that write the Common Core and Educational Technology blog. They were part of the 2011 cohort of the MERIT program which I directed, and so I can say without any hint of subjectivity that they're amazing people. So what have they done? They have launched a blog in which strong educational technology resources are... More →
As a former speech teacher, I can’t tell you how jealous I am that today’s teachers have the ability to provide their young rhetoricians with the tools that the big boys use. When I discovered that tablets like the Xperia can be used as teleprompters, I thought back to all of those student hours spent writing notecards and designing cue cards. I remembered with pain the... More →
As a special educator one of the most easily addressed disabilities I've encountered is visual impairment; however, it is also one the most overlooked. This statement is in no way intended to minimize the challenges students with visual impairments face. It is simply intended to point out the wide range of magnification and access tools available to students in today's technologically advanced world. Despite this, I... More →
PicsArts for Kids (free in the Google Play store), has features that will appeal to all aspiring young artists. Students can draw freely on a blank canvas (which supports multi-finger touch), color a variety of different pre-made pages (your tablet can also be your coloring book!), and students can learn to draw more complex figures by combining different shapes. For a free app, it has a lot of nice... More →
In an earlier resource, I discussed how you could use your Xperia tablet as a wireless microphone in order to dictate to text with Dragon. This is still a fabulous speech-to-text program, but it has two distinct drawbacks. First, you can not dictate directly into the tablet, rather it remotely transmits to a desktop or laptop computer which has Dragon Dictation installed on it. Second, Dragon is... More →
If you have spent any time at all in recent professional development sessions for teachers, you have almost certainly run across the term Universal Design for Learning (UDL). The term applies to reaching and engaging all types of learners through the use of innovative and a multi-sensory approach. It’s a great idea that I feel all educators should strive to achieve, but it can be a... More →
MyScript Calculator is a free calculator app with a special feature, it is designed especially for touchscreens, providing handwriting recognition as it does its calculations! This is almost like magic. You can scrall a wide variety of mathematical operations and equations on your tablet and this app quickly translates your handwritten numerals and symbols into digital text and delivers the computations in almost real time. This calculator... More →
Not all tablets and computers are created equal. And they don't always play nicely with each other. As an educator, this can be infuriating. I'm trying to teach our kids and their teachers, and I'm constantly running into blockades that prevent me from being able to seamlessly present cross-platform products. I just want to teach and for my students to learn. Thankfully, I was able to find... More →
We’ve all grown attached to our email programs, but there are some distinct advantages for using GMail as your email client when you’re an educator, and particularly as an administrator. Here’s my top five reasons to use GMail in an educator’s life: 1. Ability to search all emails - using the search box at the top of the page, I can search... More →
In my role as a curriculum and technology specialist, I often encounter teachers who say things like, “I want to create lessons that take advantage of digital content, but I don’t know what that looks like.” Often, this is because teacher schedules are so hectic, and searching the Internet takes time that many teachers don’t have. That’s why I was so excited... More →
Many teachers love the collaborative nature of documents in the Google Drive system, but have difficulties keeping what is shared with them organized. I have some recommendations on how to handle that, and hope this will help you take advantage of all that collaborative documents make possible. Note that if you are brand new to Google Drive, this post may be confusing. I am assuming an understanding of... More →
Google Drive allows students to write collaboratively. This falls in the Big Whopping Deal category, as students tend to be far more interested in producing higher quality work when the audience expands beyond the teacher. Student work can be reviewed, commented on, and discussed by peers in order to improve it before "turning in" the final draft to the teacher. In Part 1, I described an approach to keeping... More →
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Michigan-based Learning Gems brings educational apps to Android http://t.co/g7DpLfJYvE #INelearn #evscnetwork #SonyEDU #edtech
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