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 →
Reading comes to life with interactive eBooks using the Storia app by Scholastic. Get five free books just for downloading the app. It's easy, just download and install the Storia app, launch, sign in and read. Teachers like that they get five free books and that they can use their Scholastic bonus points to buy eBooks. But what teachers really like about Storia, is the built-in book manager. Books... 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 →
You did it! You made the wise decision to purchase a SONY Xperia tablet. Now what? As an educator it can be quite overwhelming to wade through the vast amount of information out there on the best Android apps to use. Let me help you by posting my findings on a Learnist board. This first post features Wave Recorder, Skitch Evernote, Quixey, and qPDF. These... More →
Well the SONY Xperia created quite a stir in this teacher’s classroom. “Did you get, did you get it?” and “Can we see it?” were repeated by many anxious voices as I unveiled the new classroom learning tool. The live wallpaper of swimming koi, complete with water ripples when you touch the screen, helped up the coolness factor. ... 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 →
Sony Xperia Tablet and Second Language Learners from Keri Duncan on Vimeo. The above video is an example of how the Sony Xperia tablet is used in a one-to-one situation with a second language learner. Each week a volunteer at the school comes and spends the day working with different students. For about 40 minutes she works with this particular student to help him in his fluency for sight words.... More →
As great as it would be to have a tablet for every student, and although it may seem a little more feasible than the one to one computer solution, it still may be a ways off for many teachers and schools. There are still lots of great ways to use the one tablet in the classroom. For the primary classroom, one option for the tablet is to use it as... More →
In my classroom I am constantly recording what my students are doing and putting it on my class Web site. Finding an easy way to accomplish this feat has been cumbersome at times because there have been too many steps such as loading video onto my laptop, editing the video, converting the video for the Web, and then uploading it to my site. Victory was... More →
Kids Numbers and Math by Intellijoy - paid version - has 8 different activities for children from pre-school through second grade. First there is just the identification of numbers. A number is on the screen, it is said, child repeats it and goes to the next number. The second game is to count the number of flowers and choose the correct number. After 5 correct answers there is a little positive feedback... 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 →
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 →
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 →
Social media has become so prevalent that it seems like our lives are bombarded with bursts of tweets, pins, check-ins, quick links, hashtags, and Instagrams. What too often gets lost is the substance behind all of those short posts...and there is substance. No really. There is. The cliché knock on social media is that it is just self-absorded nothingness post after post about where someone is eating... 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 →
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 →
People of a certain age remember the days of diagramming sentences for parts of speech. Many bemoan that kids today just do not know how to write using correct grammar and perhaps we should go back to direct teaching of these important English concepts. Have no fear, the Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS) have it covered. Specifically, third graders are expected to “Explain the function... 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 →
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 →
As teachers we are always looking for ways to engage our students in learning so they don't even know they are learning, but rather, think they are just playing games. Mango Learning has done just that with their apps. This review concentrates on the Fractions Intro app, but having taken a cursory review of many of their other apps for Fractions and Decimals, they seem to really have hit... 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 →
I love challenges. Someone asked me if it was possible to get a Google Drive and a Box.net account to work together. I accepted this challenge and got to work figuring it out. I found that I can use both together. I already had Google Drive on my laptop and the Google Drive app on my Sony Xperia Tablet. I also had a Box.net account, Box sync... More →
This is an introductory activity to get to know the features of the Sony Xperia Tablet and a few of the apps. You can do the activities with a partner or by yourself. Tasks can be completed in any order. All answers should be written down on the Sony Xperia Tablet. What app would you use for that? Find the telephone number for the... More →
I have always believed that educational technology has two main roles. It allows us to put more knowledge in our heads and it allows us to share it out. The tools work in tandem and once kids develop an understanding then we ask them to share it. When the time comes to share what they know, one of my go-to apps is Pic Collage. I love Pic Collage for... More →
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It seems that many teachers in the 1:1 learning environment express frustration over getting materials both on an off of their students' devices. Box.com is a free and cloud-based solution that can greatly streamline these management issues and allow teachers to focus on fostering the 4 C's of 21st Century Learning: Collabortation, Critical Thinking, Creativity, and Communication. Collaboration: When groups engaging in project or challenge based learning activities are... More →
Colleagues often ask me where I find new tools and ideas for enhancing learning with technology. Obviously, I always learn from and share the great resources available from my fellow Sony Education Ambassadors, but beyond that, with so much content available on the web and so few hours in the day, I try to be as efficient in my learning as possible. As a result, I’ve gradually assembled... More →
The school year is winding down and my students just completed the New York State Common Core assessments for English Language Arts and Math. The reality is that assessment has moved to the forefront of every educator’s mind as we raise the rigor and expectations of our students’ skills and knowledge. The use of flashcards as a study aid is definitely not new, but I have... More →
What if I told you that you could provide your students with an entire collegiate semester of foreign language instruction in just 34 hours? Now, what if I told you that you could provide that instruction anytime of the day or night and right on their tablet? No really, this isn’t a hypothetical. That would be pretty awesome right? Well, you can do this very... More →
In my first “Common Core Connections: Time to Study” post I mention how the Xperia can help reinforce the concepts we are teaching to support the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). This post focuses on another Web-based program that has a corresponding app, VocabularySpellingCity. This is a popular and versatile Web/app combo that like Study Stack/gflash+ (see my previous post) allows... More →
From a special education perspective, two of the largest challenges to student academic progress that teachers face are engagement and age appropriate material. I would also step out on a limb and say these are major challenges to all teachers. For instance, if you want one of your middle school students to improve or master his punctuation usage, providing him handouts with See Spot Run excerpts is neither... More →
Thank you to all the teachers for your dedication, time and energy. Our learners need your passion and expertise to guide their learning. Your work is inspiring and much appreciated! As a teacher for over 35 years, I know that teachers love, and need, free stuff. So I was on a mission to find stuff for you. I haven't read all the fine print and haven't requested all of... More →
RT @KristiZoerhof: My Ss are LOVING apps Clever Blocks and Shift It! GREAT visual spatial problem solving on the Xperia tablets! #SonyEDU
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