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 →
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 →
In this video Sony Education Ambassador Andy Losik shows some of his fifth graders hard at work and having lots of fun learning seventeen different professional camera angles. Five groups of students are all handled a different device. The Sony Bloggie and Xperia tablet are among those in play. The overall goal is not to create Hollywood masterpieces but to gain tech literacy with many different devices and platforms. ... 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 →
Last year, I wrote a blog post titled “11 Things I Think I Know About 1:1 Classroom Management.” In that post, I approached teaching in a 1:1 environment from the perspective of what it takes to teach well in a media-rich environment. The conclusion I came to was that, really, the skills that it takes to be an effective teacher in the Digital Age are the same as the skills it... 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 →
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One app that comes with your machine is Movie Studio (please excuse my busy background). If you're looking for the Xperia equivalent of Premiere, this ain't it. That said, if you need a quick way to bring together a few clips, pictures, and music, Movie Studio can do the job. The app allows adding any of the items mentioned above, as well as taking pictures and video from... 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 →
The Google Play Store on your Android tablet offers a wide range of educational apps that are great for not only younger writers but writers of all ages as well. There’s likely an app that will help your students with their mobile writing endeavors! Here are some of my favorite writing apps that are great for your Android tablet. All of these apps are free and all are... More →
Students love to tell stories. Students love to create stories. There are loads of great Android apps that allow students to capture images and video and do things like make movies, annotate what they capture, and add in their voice. Check out these great apps that allow students to create stories on the go: Skitch With the built-in front facing and rear facing cameras on your Xperia tablet,... 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 →
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 →
Many kids love to read, and if they don’t, well we as teachers want to instill a love for reading in them. Reading opens new worlds to many students where they would never be able to go, or opens a fantasy land to their imagination. Of course there are many story apps to use with your students, so I will just review a few. Read Me... More →
I recently came across a handy app on the Sony Xperia that was already there right out of the box. The app is called Scrapbook. If you don’t already see the Scrapbook app on your home screen, press Apps & Widgets in the top right corner to locate the Scrapbook app. To add an app to your home screen, just press and hold on it until you 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 →
If you teach third-grade boys you know that in their independent reading bag they will at some point have a graphic novel like the books by Dav Pilkey in their independent reading bag. This is not to say that the girls do not appreciate this genre too. As third-grade teacher, I have observed first-hand how ears perk up whenever... More →
The titles of my blog posts usually begin with Common Core Connections. At first a post on homework planners for the Xperia table might not make sense. However, if you think about it, students will be better equipped to meet the CCSS if they are organized and actually do the reinforcement work and projects teachers assign. I taught first grade for 10 years and homework completion... 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 →
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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