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 →
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 →
I'm really excited to use the Sony Xperia Tablet with K-2 students. I'm sure that they will think of even more ways to use the apps than I will. The first 6 year old that I handed the Xperia Tablet to immediately tapped on an app to open it. It was intuitive. I did need to show her how to get back to the home screen and how... 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 →
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 →
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 →
Techsmith's Coach's Eye app may have been designed for coaches and athletes to analyze athletic performance but it harbors a lot of potential for any teaching situation. It is also one a very select number of apps on the Android platform that can be used to annotate video or flip learning. I have been looking long and hard to find an app on the Android platform that... More →
If you are in the classroom like me, then you know that getting a one-to-one reading assessment completed without interruptions is a miracle. I have perfected the art of peripheral vision scanning of the other students as I conduct running records, and my frantic hand gestures to those that would interrupt are unmistakable. What I have not perfected is the art of completing the forms... 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 →
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 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 →
4 Pics 1 Word is a free app from "LOTUM GmbH" which provides 4 pictures and the students are to deduce the word which all four pictures represent and then to use the provided letters to spell the one word which fits all the pictures - thus the name, 4 Pics 1 Word. This kind of word game promotes thinking and discussion in younger students as well as in students still learning or developing English... 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 →
Last month Google announced a new, handy little tool called Google Keep. First of all, I really like the simplicity of this app. Like the other Google Apps, it's tied to your Google account. More specifically it's connected to Google Drive. You can head here to download Google Keep from Google Play. Once you've created notes, you can view them by going to drive.google... 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 →
Any one that is familiar with the Orton Gillingham approach to teaching reading would greatly question how using a tablet is at all relevant. Orton Gillingham is a multi-sensory, sequential approach to teaching reading, spelling, and writing for individuals that have difficulties often associated with dyslexia. The key part is that it is multi-sensory and combines visual, auditory, and kinesthetic approaches. When learning a letter and... More →
Every summer I present a course to teachers called, “Pack Your Digital Backpack.” All year long I collect my favorite digital tools curated from Twitter, Diigo and some of my favorite blogs- tools that are low risk and high impact. Then I present them “smackdown” style to teachers. It’s a fun course because as we go over each tool, teachers collaboratively come up... More →
In another post on this site, I highlighted the TED app for Android, and am returning to that app to talk about ways we think about our students. Do we know what they can do? More to the point, do we know how our thinking can limit what we see of what they can do? A friend asked me recently this question, "What's the coolest thing you've seen... 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 →
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 →
The other day, I visited the classroom of a friend of mine. She is an amazing teacher who is very creative and is constantly finding ways to create a sense of wonder and joy in her high school language arts classroom. Given her artistic talents, I am never surprised to see something new and unique in her room. Over the years, she has furnished her classroom with chairs and tables... 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 →
It is my ultimate dream to create a paperless classroom. I could take the stance that this goal is purely from an eco-conscious standpoint, but selfishly I am tired of dealing with broken-down printers and copy machines. Wouldn’t it be great to avoid them altogether? Why not have your students do all of the work on your Xperia tablets and then email them to you, export... More →
English and reading teachers will rejoice when they download Reading Gridlines on their tablet.Reading Gridlines is a free android app that helps students focus on sections of the screen. This app adds gridlines to your eBook app or any other app you select. In order to focus on screen and text, we need reading gridlines to split the text into several parts, and quickly digest the text one by... More →
The future doesn’t always deliver on the promises it makes to us as children, but video chats are one place where The Jetsons didn’t let me down. I may not be able to travel by pneumatic tube to school, have a delicious steak delivered to me in seconds at the touch of a button, or rely on my robot to clean up my messes, but I... More →
